STIRLING
Yeah, get up in the morning. That sort of thing.
IAIN STIRLING
Yeah, this is exactly the point I was going to make. It’s not a bad thing. What I mean is my childhood was amazing and you’re an amazing mum and Dad’s an amazing dad – parents that you know would lie down in traffic for you – but then it also means that when someone says, ‘This deadline was due a week ago,’ I’m now the sort of person to say, ‘It will be fine, someone will sort it out.’ Because in my head I’m going, ‘Mummy and Daddy will sort it out.’ And I think if I were to have kids I would get them to do more. But what I’m saying is that’s not bad. The point I’m making is what was it about? What aspects of your upbringing affected how you were as a parent?
ALISON STIRLING
My dad died when I was 17 days old, and there was my brother, 14 years older than me, and then there were three stepchildren and they were older as well, so, you know, my mother had a lot to do. She needed money, so she went out and worked. So from an early age I was in the nursery, and then when I went to school that’s when she said, ‘Well, we’ll get people in.’ And I hated it. I absolutely hated it. And she was trying her absolute best but it got to the stage that she got me a blackboard. I wanted a bike but we couldn’t afford one for Christmas so I got a blackboard.
IAIN STIRLING
Same letter. It’s still a ‘B’, Alison. It begins with ‘B’.
ALISON STIRLING
So I used to write notes to my mum on the blackboard, things that I would remember from school.
IAIN STIRLING
What, notes like you need to buy milk or like I learned that the sky is blue?
ALISON STIRLING
No, no. About something that happened that day – by the time she came in I might have forgotten about it. So I would write that down and then my mother would write something on the blackboard and it became a wee thing with us, and it was great. But it doesn’t beat coming in to your mum and saying, ‘You know what happened at school today?’ And then your nanna got ill. She got cancer when I was 12 and that kind of turned everything round. She had 18 months to live and it turned her absolutely wild. So she basically started giving things away because she wanted things to be in order and it was a hellish time to go through, and I realise now that I was a carer, but at that point I wouldn’t have known I was. We got a new washing machine and Mum couldn’t use it – I was doing it. So I think that’s what made me think I will never make my children old before their time.
IAIN STIRLING
I mean, I’m 30 years old and still wouldn’t know how to use a dishwasher.
ALISON STIRLING
What is it you said to me when I said, ‘Put that in the washing machine’? You said, ‘Is that the one with the round door or the square door?’
IAIN STIRLING
When was that?
ALISON STIRLING
You were in your teens.
IAIN STIRLING
I was easily in my teens. Oh my God.
A SHORT BIT OUTLINING HOW PARENTING HAS CHANGED
To help us understand how parenting has changed over the generations I’m going to use some terms to talk about each generation specifically. Once we’re all on board with that code we can plough on with my hilarious content! The three main generations I’ll be looking at are millennials (that’s me), who roughly speaking were born between 1981 and 2002, Generation X (my parents’ generation), who were born in the years 1961 to 1980, and finally baby boomers (my grandparents), who were born from 1941 to 1960. There, hopefully that’ll save some time.
Parenting has seen massive shifts over the years. For me, the biggest affecting millennials is the shift from a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards a much more hands-on modern approach. Indeed, Generation X were known as the ‘latch-door kids’ because their baby-boomer folks were often out working or socialising, so the kids had to let themselves in when they went home after school or being out with their friends. Many Generation Xers lived with their parents in a manner more akin to flatmates than legal guardians. Take my mum, for example, communicating with her own mother through a blackboard like some sort of post-war WhatsApp messenger.
In fact in the 1980s parents’ need to be away from their children and near their peers led to the construction of many age-restricted communities where adults could hang out in child-free zones, such as holiday resorts, and the rise of the infamous ‘kids clubs’ that are still popular to this day. Parents could go lie on a sun lounger while their kid was taken off to play with some out-of-work actor in his mid-twenties dressed like a clown or a prince (royalty, not the pop star). To many this might sound like sloppy parenting, but I bet it sounds like heaven to the modern kid who constantly has to keep their parents updated on their movements via their mobile phone, or can’t post anything online because they know their parents have set up secret online accounts just so they can keep an eye on their comings and goings. Want to go to the cinema on your own? Of course you can! Well, I mean, Mum and Dad will be there, obviously, but they’ll sit a few rows back.
KIDS ARE SHIT AT STUFF
On the face of things it would seem that this overprotection is born out of a parent’s need to protect and serve their precious little ones. But I mean, how can I, or any millennial for that matter, hope to embrace adult life when Mummy and Daddy are still willing to do your washing when you’re well into your thirties? In fact, after the podcast was recorded with my mum, she made us mac and cheese while I was on my phone.
But a sort of misplaced love isn’t the only factor at work here. Although it is an undisputed fact that children are beautiful and fragile presents from God that need to be protected and nurtured, there is no getting away from the truth that they take fucking ages to do stuff. Watching a child getting dressed (and please only do so if the appropriate social and legal norms are in place) is one of the most excruciating processes in the history of mankind. They don’t know which hole to stick their head through in a T shirt, socks are approached with a level of concentration that should be reserved for bomb-disposal experts and you can dream on if you think these dafties are getting anything on their person should that garment involve buttons. So at the end of the day it is much easier for Mum and Dad to dress the dithering idiot themselves, thus saving an invaluable half an hour. This time can then be spent doing fun ‘parent’ things like not sleeping or wishing you still had disposable income.
If any of you question whether or not parents dress their children out of love or necessity, simply watch a mother putting shoes on her toddler. It remains one of the most barbaric acts I have ever seen performed by one human on another. And I say that as a man who’s spent two long weekends on lads’ holidays to Amsterdam. Viciously smashing Thomas the Tank Engine strap-ups onto the soles of unsuspecting three-year-olds is not the action of someone in love, but rather of a women who is 20 minutes late for a swimming lesson.
This same notion applies to all aspects of life. You name it, kids are shit at it: setting the table, taking in the washing, doing homework. All activities can be sped up tenfold by simply doing them yourself. But this ‘overprotection’ comes at a price. Millennials are growing up not learning necessary
