hopes and desires above their own at any cost. Evenings were spent taking me to any club or hobby that remotely tickled my fancy. Football, tennis, golf, swimming, boy scouts, amateur dramatics – you name it, I was painfully average at all of them, but Christ was I diverse. In theatre, people speak of the ‘triple threat’, one of those talented son of a guns that could sing, dance and act. Well, I, Iain Stirling, was more like an sexuple threat. I would sing, dance and act, while in a swimming pool, playing golf with Akela looking on, ready to give me my putting badge. This severely watered down my ability to excel in any particular area, but I was having a lovely time and Mummy said I was good, so what does actual objective success even matter? As I type this I can imagine my mum saying to me, ‘You weren’t average at all, son. You were uniquely talented.’
Every problem I ever faced was never faced alone. I always had the support of my loving parents no matter what. And when it came to her baby boy there were few lengths my mother wouldn’t go to. When I got bullied, my mum didn’t just go into the school. She didn’t just tell me that I should ignore it. What Alison Stirling did was sign me up to self-defence classes three times a week. She had to buy me all the gear, drive me there and back in the evenings and give up her weekends for competitions and exams – all because of that one time Gavin pushed me in a puddle.
Now I’m not saying all my mother’s acts of parenting were needlessly overbearing. Self-defence is undoubtedly a useful skill, and the weekly socialising and exercise were great for my physical and mental health. The issue I have is with the discipline Mother decided for me – judo. The problem was that judo didn’t have any real-life implications in terms of thwarting those evil bullies (well, Gavin). As a martial art it is definitely one of the more passive disciplines. On the intimidation scale I was less Conor McGregor and more Gandhi. First of all, for judo to work you and your opponent need to be in a hold, and secondly for that hold to work you both need to be wearing the appropriate gown. ‘Oh, you want my lunch money, do you? Well, stick on this dressing gown because we’re about to cuddle.’ I carried on with judo for a further seven years, until a little girl called Katie snapped my collarbone and, as a family, we decided I should maybe focus on the arts. During those seven years the bullying never subsided, but my health improved significantly, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time. I imagine Gavin is now a professional internet troll.
Although it seems like a great thing for millennials to grow up with parents willing to go above and beyond in order for them to live the best lives possible, some experts have spoken out, claiming millennials have grown up with what is now being regarded as ‘bad parenting’. This phrase might make it sound like we all grew up with some sort of abuse or neglect, but actually it’s quite the opposite. ‘Bad parenting’ is the idea that our parents told us throughout our childhoods that we were special and could achieve anything we wanted, so long as we wanted it badly enough. During my childhood I remember my mum constantly telling me that I was ‘special’ and could ‘achieve anything’.
Other ultimately useless information was also thrown at me on regular occasions, such as ‘Iain, the bullies are picking on you because they’re jealous.’ Yeah, that’s right, Mum, the bullies are jealous of my stutter and my lazy eye. The truth is that kids pick on kids because kids are pricks and picking on people is fun. It’s called ‘making fun’ for a reason. Sometimes as a child you need to be told about the harsh realities of life, which I was protected from my entire childhood. I was never told about failure growing up; I was constantly protected from it. I don’t think I went to a funeral until I was at university. Heaven forbid I would be made aware of the fact that all people eventually die. I wasn’t ready for that. I was only 20.
As well as limiting our exposure to the harsh realities of life, our parents would also go above and beyond to ensure our dreams and desires could be realised. Millennial kids were never brought up with a belief that they were flawed or that they had to be realistic in their dreams. Yet despite this increased protection and support, millennials are still overall a lot less happy than their Gen X parents. How can this be? The answer is in our increased life expectations, dreams that were far ahead of anything Gen X parents ever hoped for. Essential happiness comes down to a very simple formula.
HAPPINESS = REALITIES – EXPECTATIONS
It makes total sense if you think about it. Your happiness is essentially the current situation you find yourself in, less what you expected your life to be like. This is the mistake many parents have made. Tell your kid they will grow up to be an astronaut and, shock horror, a reliable, well-paid job in admin will never really live up to their childhood expectations. This is not to say a child’s dreams shouldn’t be nurtured and encouraged, but you also need to teach them about the world’s harsh realities to temper expectations. I asked my mum whether she felt any pressure to monitor my expectations when I first started in comedy.
IAIN STIRLING
I’m at university. I’m studying law but I clearly want to be a comedian, which in our family is not a thing you do.
ALISON STIRLING
No.
IAIN STIRLING
Is there a worry like, ‘Well, I want to encourage him and make him do well, but if this idiot keeps doing gigs above pubs to six people for the rest of his life …’?
ALISON STIRLING
Do you know what, I can honestly say, ‘No.’ Your sister wanted to dance and the school made a big thing of it and said, ‘You’re surely going to discourage her.’ And I said, ‘There is absolutely no way I would discourage this.’ And I, hand on heart, wanted you to do what you wanted to, because my mother banged on about how she wanted me to be a hairdresser. She was going to buy a shop and I would do hair, and she would tell everybody. And it got to such a stage that I dreaded the time to leave school because I thought I’m going to have to tell her, but she would just think it was just a phase I was going through and all of a sudden I would want to do hair.
IAIN STIRLING
And the weirdest thing about it is she’s doing all that because she wants you to do well, do you know what I mean?
ALISON STIRLING
I think she just thought that this is something she could do for me, so instead of asking, instead of letting me find what I wanted to do, it was just, ‘This is the thing.’ And I remember I would go through hoops to try not to hurt her in any way by saying, ‘There is not a hope in hell that I will ever be a hairdresser.’
IAIN STIRLING
I’m never doing a blue rinse in my life.
ALISON STIRLING
I could not. I’m not artistic and the thought of standing with somebody’s hair and doing something with that, no. It just was not on the cards for me. That was never going to happen, so I think I realised from an early age that you’re going to get on so much further if you do what you want to do. If you make the wrong decision, it’s your decision. You do it.
IAIN STIRLING
Yeah.
ALISON STIRLING
If somebody else makes the decision it’s so easy to then say, and I’ve heard all this with friends, ‘Oh, my parents made me do this.’ And what they get is not a chip on their shoulder – it’s a boulder. So your doing comedy was absolutely not an issue. People in the law school would say, ‘Oh, for goodness sake, why is he not doing this?’
IAIN STIRLING
Because
