Book of the dayHealth, mind and body booksReviewWhat should be the top priority for a parent? A bestseller considers screens, sleep and why children should be listened to, though not always agreed with
It is one of the cliches of parenthood that the behaviour which comes most easily (a reproving tone of voice, say, or an attitude to your child’s tears) reflects what your parents did with you. It takes a while to realise that what feels like instinct is often an inheritance, that just because something comes “naturally” it is not necessarily constructive. It may get in the way, first, of the relationship between parent and child, and then, because this relationship provides the foundation for all future relationships, of how the child will get on in the world.
Enter Philippa Perry’s book, which has an inspired title (even if one commenter on Mumsnet argued it veers a little close to clickbait). Perry has a plan “for parents who not only love their children but want to like them too”. Except it isn’t really a plan, as such: more of an attitude, a way of being, a set of assumptions. Children are not problems to be fixed or projects at which to excel, but individuals to be understood and supported, in a mutually respectful relationship. Their feelings, however inconvenient, must be heard and validated (which is very different from being agreed with), because if they aren’t they will find other, even less desirable ways of expressing themselves, if not at the time then later in life. Perry understands how necessary it is to examine our reactions to these small individuals, and to determine whether what we are reacting to, when we become angry or distressed, is their behaviour, or something childlike in ourselves.
Perry is a psychotherapist and agony aunt who has spent 20 years, as she puts it, “mirroring and validating” to get people “back on track. If parents could do this from the off, surely I could give up being a psychotherapist – and arrange flowers instead.” She is also the parent of a daughter, Flo (who, she reveals in one of the rare personal passages, was born with the umbilical cord wrapped three times around her neck – it was years before Perry could talk about it calmly). The book is anchored in tiny parenting triumphs – getting home with the shopping without being derailed by a tantrum, for example – and an understanding that mistakes are inevitable: what matters is what you then do about them. It is like a letter from a wise friend who happens to have done years of research, and – in this culture that will teach you how to take a good selfie but not how to nurture a healthy relationship – can feel like water on a parched plain. Which is perhaps one of the reasons it has spent months on the bestseller list.
Perry begins at the beginning – before the beginning in fact, with the atmosphere that shapes the parent and will in turn shape what a foetus will hear and feel and then, once born, encounter. She is vivid about the spectrum of what she calls desertion, imagining it literally, as a desert where a baby cries out for food and water and attention, which is “not a want but a need”. Do parents come when called, or do they believe in leaving a baby to cry, which will eventually silence the cries but will not answer the need? Do they push an older child away with lack of interest, or with contentless praise? Because when a child shows you their painting, they are showing you “who they really are”. Do they dismiss complex feelings as “just tired” or “just hungry”, or “just seeking attention”, creating the deep loneliness in the child of not being seen or heard or felt? This is likely to create adults who “feel real only when they have a direct behavioural or emotional impact on those around them”. Did the parent inherit an “inner critic”, which is now emerging in a different generation?
Or is this a place where behaviour is understood as one of many languages, where strong feelings are heard and contained by adults, thus building a deep trust? Such behaviour will also create a default mood for life – as Perry puts it, a vitally necessary “habit of optimism”, which is not the same as happiness, the expectation and chasing of which she sees as a kind of tyranny. Perry quotes Adam Phillips – “the demand that we be happy undermines our lives” – and makes an argument for something far more nourishing: a life of connection, of give and take and light and shade and emotional resilience. Of true confidence versus surface bravura. This is the job of parenting – not the chasing of outward success or surface polish or obedience.
In a comment on a recent piece about the bestselling author Dr Gabor Maté, whose book Hold on to Your Kids argues that parents need to matter more to children than their peers do, a reader accused him of being selfish. But he, like Steve Biddulph, author of the bestselling Raising Boys, and now Perry, argues that what is at stake is not just personal closeness, lovely as that might be, but nothing less than the child’s physical and emotional safety. As Perry puts it, baldly: “You want to be the person your child can talk to. If you tell them they are silly to complain when granny made them a nice lentil stew, they may feel they can’t tell you when the creepy piano teacher puts his hand on their leg.”
Perry includes bits of rough poetry: to sing with a child is to ‘breathe and play together’Perry is generous and accepting but has clear boundaries. She is severe about distraction as a tool, for instance – what she calls the “look, squirrel” syndrome, when a child tells you an important thing and you can’t work out what to say, so you change the subject. Using distraction is manipulative, insulting to a child’s intelligence, and teaches them not to concentrate. She disapproves entirely of sleep-training, and of parents habitually using their phones and other screens in a child’s presence – “not only will you be depriving them of contact, you will be creating an empty space inside them. And not to be dramatic, but this is the sort of empty space that may make addicts of people later in life.” She is fascinating about lying (adults should not do it, but children will, and we must not make a big deal of it).
The book provides useful case histories and some eye-opening facts: the “breast-crawl”, for instance (the ability of a newborn to find its mother’s breast all on its own); and the realisation that more summer-born children are diagnosed with ADHD than those born in September. And Perry includes bits of rough poetry: to sing with a child is to “breathe and play together”; “no one likes to be left to dance alone, even if it is a dance of war”. On the other hand, in her book everyone seems to have a European name and background; also, she makes few allowances for having more than one child; and she doesn’t, as Melissa Benn has noted, give quite enough air to families under great social, emotional and physical stress – though I suspect Perry would argue that quality of attention must be aimed for regardless.
It is hard to read fast, not just because Perry’s text is punctuated by exercises – unpack the last argument you had, for instance, or write down all your self-critical thoughts for a day – but because it prompts so many realisations, or insights, or clearly names things that have until now existed just beyond one’s awareness. And it provides tools, straightforward and manageable if not always easy, that can be implemented at once. I am grateful for it.
The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) by Philippa Perry (Penguin Books Ltd, £10.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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