Читать книгу A Spoonful of Sugar - Liz Fraser - Страница 11

She stands up gingerly and hobbles to fetch a box half full of what looks like they might once have been ginger biscuits. When offered, I take one, nervously. I’m reasonably sure you can’t die from eating a ten-year-old ginger biscuit, so let’s keep an old lady happy.

‘When I was young,’ she continues, sitting down again and taking a suspiciously chewy bite of something that should be rather crunchy, ‘we didn’t worry. We really didn’t. We had very few things, but what we did have was the freedom to live happily and to grow – without worry. Kids seem to have so much to worry about now – but why? Why put that on them?’

It’s true indeed that there is far more for children to fret about than even when I was growing up ages and ages ago … in the 1980s. My children worry about everything: from getting their five portions of fruit a day to what they wear, whether they’ll pass their ballet exams; whether they have even a tenth of the myriad technological gadgets on offer in Tesco’s; what’s on YouTube; if they have seen all the latest films; whether the world is about to burn itself into a crisp; why they haven’t received any emails for a month; if they are the only kids in the class to go to bed at eight o’clock, and a million other things.

Much of this has not come from me (especially the five portions thing, which the school curriculum seems to obsess about and it drives me crazy) but from school and their friends. So what can we parents do to alleviate some of this concern?

Over to Granny: ‘Well, you don’t have to heap so much responsibility onto their shoulders, do you?’

‘Responsibility? Like what?’

‘Like all of your own worries. If you are worried about how much exercise they take, then just fit some more into their daily life, without making a big deal about it. Don’t have a long talk with them about how bad it is not to exercise enough. They don’t need to know that until they are well into their teens, and if you’ve got them into a healthy routine they’ll do it as part of their normal life anyway. Stressing kids out about what they eat, and all the bad things that are happening in the world, and how much work you have to do, and deadlines and things going on in a marriage are not at all for children’s ears.’

‘So, basically you’re saying we should chill out more and protect them from a lot of our worries?’

‘Yes! It’s about as simple and easy as that. It even extends to all the little responsibilities you give them, like what they wear, what they eat, what they watch. Children aren’t designed to take so much responsibility on board – they sometimes need to be told: this is the way it is, so eat up, or put this on, and that’s the way it is!’