Parenting: Laundry is forever - but play time goes like a flash

Doing activities with your children might be tiresome, but it is all part of parenting. Photo / 123rf

OPINION

How should we balance the time we spend with our children and the time we spend doing the many, many chores having children creates?

To some extent, this is a question about the anxiety one feels when viewing the enormous pile of unfolded washing sitting in the hall. To an even greater extent, it’s a question about the anxiety one feels when one’s partner returns home to find the enormous pile of washing still unfolded in the hall.

When my wife went out last Sunday, my children insisted I play “pretend school” with them. If I had known this was going to be more or less a full school day, played out in real time, complete with a full period of maths, I probably would have suggested doing something – anything – else. But once I was sitting on that tiny chair, at that tiny table, with a pencil case and sheaf of papers, and my son was standing in front of thedesk angrily demanding I call him “Mr Lunch”, I knew I was in for the long haul and I had immediate regrets.

This shouldn’t have been news to me. Whether the game is pretend school, lounge soccer, indoor equestrian or dance showcase, chances are high that if it starts at all, it will be preceded by heated discussions about rules, roles, teams, boundaries, location, equipment and who gets to go first. There will be many, many rounds of Paper Scissors Rock, all of them followed by arguments about who won and most of them followed by crying. “It will be very quick” is always a lie. Minutes are always hours. The key for any parent hoping to survive and thrive in this situation is patience and acceptance - because fun is going to be in short supply.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the fact that we live in a society where everything we do is supposed to have a benefit: to make us healthier, wealthier, happier, more successful, more efficient, more effective and so on. This expectation is multiplied several-fold when it comes to parenting, because the outcome – the people who eventuate from our decisions – is so visible, and the stakes for them, for us and our society so high.

The relentless pressure and limitless content of the parenting-industrial complex demands that we consider how every interaction with our kids shapes who they will become, but to this instrumentalist approach I now say, enough. Life is too uncertain, the science too vague, the data too overwhelming. It’s time to stop striving and start parenting.

I don’t know whether playing pretend school for several hours will help my kids grow into the sort of adult who cares about others or the sort of adult who cares about tax cuts - and frankly, even if it were possible to find out, I would choose not to. There’s something repugnant about the idea of approaching parenting that way.

Pretend school went on and on. It was still going when my wife came home and passive-aggressively ignored the washing in the hall. Although I was emotionally exhausted from the game’s many arguments and demands and multiplication exercises, and I had many times wanted to call it a day, I hadn’t, and I felt good about that.

Later, after the kids had gone to bed, I found a story my 6-year-old had written, during one of the lessons conducted by his older sister, aka Ms Prendergast. The story read:

“Oens apon a time. there was a dragon who likd to eating tomartos. But what she relly like doing was rolerskating But one day she fell over and she sid aho.”

I didn’t know what “aho” meant or why the dragon ate “tomartos” and, of course, it didn’t matter. The idea that struck me with great and furious force, as my eyes grew hot and my throat constricted, was the monotonous tide of washing will surge in and out forever, but my six-year-old’s perfectly misspelled stories are a brief and wondrous flash that, too, will soon be gone.