Greg Bruce: Mediocre parents might just be the best parents

The overwhelm is real, so maybe it's time to stop trying so hard.

My first Father’s Day as a dad occurred when our first child was not quite a month old. I was chock full of oxytocin and unjustified self-belief: our daughter was super cute, a great sleeper, very smart for her age and fun to be around. Although I wouldn’t have said so, I knew much of the credit for those things should go to me.

So when my wife presented me with my first-ever Father’s Day card, which read, “You might only be a new dad, but I’m pretty sure you’ll be the best dad,” I was touched, but not especially surprised.

In those early days, when our daughter woke in the night to breastfeed, I too would wake, sitting up, talking with my wife then pacing up and down our bedroom with our daughter in my arms, settling her back to sleep. I would look at us in the mirror as I walked, filled with love and self-admiration. The Father’s Day card, I knew, had spoken the truth. Millions of dads out there were snoring the night away in bedrooms far from their wakeful children and exhausted wives, but not me! Wow, I was great.

Let’s now leave this idyllic scene and cut to six months later. It’s 4am and I’m getting out of bed for the seventh time that night. For several months now, our daughter has been crying all night, except for the periods in which my wife or I are pacing with her up and down her bedroom, which is just about always. When pacing ceases to be effective, I jiggle her up and down as we walk, and when that too fails, I begin doing power squats, there in the midsummer night, until the sweat is pouring off me. At this point, it’s clear that our daughter is broken and I am the one that has broken her. I am ashamed, and also extremely jealous of the millions of dads out there snoring the night away in bedrooms as far as possible from their own children.

Let’s now leave this horrific scene and cut to four years later. It is 3am and our third baby, a few months old, has just woken for the first time that night. “I’ll feed him,” my wife says, as she always does, bringing him into our bed from his place right next to ours. When she finishes, he sleeps next to us, not that I notice: the thought of me being awake during this process now seems so ridiculous as to be embarrassing. I don’t think of the millions of dads out there snoring the night away, because I am one of them.

It’s easy to look back on these events and laugh because they are so long ago, and because pain is always funny when it’s inflicted on someone as smug as I was. But to only laugh would be to fail to learn an important lesson, which is that my wife should never have given me that Father’s Day card.

I wanted to be the best dad, and even believed that goal to be within my grasp, but as time went on, I became exhausted by my attempts to achieve it, then embarrassed by my failure to achieve it, and finally accepted it was never going to happen.

There are certain things we must give our children, but, I can’t help feeling the list has now gotten so long as to be debilitating. Infinite advice is now available on every conceivable platform advising us how to maximise and optimise our interactions, helping us to find and deploy the leading science-backed methods for dealing with tantrums, fussy eating, sleep issues, fears, sibling conflict and the infinite and infinitely complex situations we find ourselves in as parents.

Yes, knowledge is power, and some of this advice is undoubtedly helpful, but the overwhelm is real and it’s damaging. I’m not saying we should stop trying to be good parents, but that it might be time to recalibrate our notion of what “good” looks like. What I’m saying is that I can see value for both parent and child in aiming lower.

But don’t take my word for it. This article was the idea of my favourite parenting expert and wife, who sent me a text message outlining it thus: “It’s about energy preservation, thus not wearing yourself out and becoming yelly and resentful towards your perfectly normally behaving children. The other part to it is that maybe we’re all a bit too involved in our children, thinking too much of our importance in their lives and not allowing them to just exist and be who they want to be.”

If only she’d written that message in my first Father’s Day card.