They fuck you up, your mum and dad…they don’t mean to but they do

I was talking this over with ‘never say no’ Kate last night as she supped meditatively over her sixth glass of white – she can drink, that girl, and frequently does. But who can blame her on her nights off when she’s not on Lola duty?

We’d already covered off ‘reasons why it’s okay to order dinner from the local kebab house’, whether or not I’d fit into Kate’s red dress with black spots and ‘do we think we’re bipolar two’ but hadn’t quite reached ‘have you ever used a butt plug?’ – Answer: ‘no but hmm in-ter-est-ing.’

Conversation tends only to degenerate to that level post 2.00 am, and as it was a school night, I tried to wind things up at 11.00pm.

Also known as ‘one for t’ road’ Kate, she’s a bad leaver, but these days when she malingers, I’m much better at just putting on my pyjamas and falling asleep until she gets the message and heads off on her way. Kate’s one of the reprobates, a loose collective of women for whom motherhood didn’t turn them into a holier than thou tiger mother or an insipid judgemental yummy.

These reprobates, who still enjoyed a crafty fag, or might supplement afternoon tea with a glass or two of vino, all have kids who know how to throw one, which is the other reason we gravitated towards one another. It’s hard to be judgemental about someone else’s kid when your own can veer off the scale too. But the kids of my group of reprobate mums all have one thing in common. Not only are the first borns, they’re only children too. Except for Jonah.

Only kids used to have a bad reputation for being spoiled and selfish, but in a world increasingly populated by only children, it’s easy enough to find the odd exception to the rule. Gone are the days when kids would be equalised by the brutal world of siblings, who place them firmly in their pecking order, and proceed to knock their corners off.

Parents too lack the learning curve of being left in charge of younger siblings. As a child of the 80s, I may have grown up in a broken home, with disparate steps coming in and out of my life, but what I lacked was an assortment of younger siblings from whom to learn to parent by proxy.

I can only speak from my own experiences, but it’s symptomatic of a wider malaise. Parents haven’t got a fucking clue when it comes to their first born, and my god do they balls it up. It’s kindness that does it, and a nanny state that takes neglect as the default position of every parent in the country and rams home propaganda about bonding, interacting and demand feeding your bamboozled baby, which completely fails to take into account the many mothers are try-hard over-achievers (me) and only want their child to love them to make up for their own messy childhoods (like mine).

I followed every jot of advice with Jonah. “Feed him on demand”, said my holistic, home birth midwives. Co-sleep; pick him up when he cries. That I did. For six bloody months, by which time I was a sleep starved harridan who occasionally would fantasise about throwing her wailing infant out the window. And before you get all hot under the collar and call the social, I’m not the only one, and my seven year old has no injuries he hasn’t inflicted on himself.

It is bad advice. The feed-on-demand tripe is trotted out on the NHS too and has turned many an innocent babe into a manipulative breast addict who has learned as a cause-action-effect certainty that when they wail, they get a nice soft comfy milky cuddle: it is hard-wired.

Whatever spectrum Jonah may or may not be on, the first thing he learned is how to get my attention, and by god did he milk it. It sets up a negative relationship between child and adult because it hands all the power to the child, and the well meaning parent becomes a slave. Seriously.

Most parents eventually realise this and take the hard road to wresting power back in their little tyrant’s toddlerdom, but the process is akin to detoxifying a crack addict, in terms of noise alone. It took Jonah three weeks of nightly tantrums to learn, aged two and a half, that we were not ever going to go in to him in the night, unless he was genuinely sick. He got the message. He became an excellent sleeper. But some parents, particularly those for whom all their eggs are in one precious basket, never learn to detach themselves from the bonds of innocent manipulation wrought on them by their single precious child.

Kate’s a case in point. She revealed last night that Lola, aged eight, sometimes gets her to feed her breakfast in the morning.

When we had Ava, we swaddled her, we routine fed her and we left her alone to find out about the world on her own terms. In a way, she ruled us too, because our lives were shaped by her routine, which is crushingly hard with a first born, but much easier to submit too when you’ve seen, first hand, the consequences of carting your baby hither and thither as if you’re still a girl about town, and having to whap out your tit every time he mewls.

Ava, 4, who these days spends most of her time pretending to be a cat, slept through the night at 12 weeks and has never been a moment’s bother ever since. I rest my case.

Babies don’t need stimulating. They don’t spontaneously combust. Leave them the fuck alone. You and they will be grateful for it when they don’t turn into an obnoxious brat.

Sermon over.