Nigel Latta - Battlefield Wisdom: Top Tips for Busy Parents

Yeah, well, good luck with that.

When my son was born I made a brief attempt at being a good parent. Im a professional, a clinical psychologist, and Id been working with families for over a decade by then. I thought it was going to be easy. So off I set, convinced that Id be a very good parent. Id spent years being paid to tell other people how to raise their kids. I was qualified and motivated; how hard could it be?

I tried hard to be a good parent, damn hard, and to my credit almost made two weeks.

The crunch came one afternoon when my wife was going out for a couple of hours to pretend she was still a real person and still had a life. Despite her misgivings, I was left in charge, pretty much by default because there was no one else. There were lists covering every eventuality from puking to tsunamis. It was supposed to be quality time for me and the boy. That was the plan anyway. To be fair we had at least a good 20 minutes of quality time. I made stupid faces, he made odd facial expressions (mostly, I suspect, from wind) and that was OK for a while. Then the novelty of quality time wore off. Theres only so much quality time you can have with someone who cant control their bowels.

The next step, obviously, was the television. Wed bought one of those Mozart videos for babies, with the interesting visuals that are supposed to make your kids brain grow. I knew it was complete nonsense, but if we hadnt and hed turned out to be a bit of a thicky then Id have never heard the end of it from his mother. We watched it for about 10 minutes. It was dull. Very dull. Then it moved beyond dull into the realms of utter tedium, and finally into the no-mans-land of just plain annoying.

And heres where we reached the crunch point, my boy and me, because I knew a good parent would soldier on. A good parent would sit and watch the whole thing while saying the colours out loud and being suitably encouraging. A good parent would sing, and count, and jiggle and STIMULATE their precious little ones BRAIN DEVELOPMENT.

We sat there for a bit, me and my boy. I knew that my next step was important. Whatever I did next would set the tone for the whole parenting experience.

Finally, after thinking it all through, after reflecting on all that Id learned about infant development and neonatal neurobiology, and all that Id learned from over a decade of working with all kinds of families, I looked down at my infant son whose life and psychological wellbeing his mother had entrusted to me. This would be my defining moment as a parent. This was where I would discover what kind of parent I really was.

Little man, I said, quietly, my voice tender, filled with the soft warm tones of the wise old father, shall we watch Arnie in Terminator 2 instead of this stupid baby crap?

He was as keen as I was. Honestly.

So we ditched the alleged brain development nonsense and watched the Governor of California blow shit up instead. It was quality time in the truest sense of the word. My, how we bonded.

From that moment on I promised to forget all that good parent nonsense and just be a plain old parent instead. My parents had just been plain old parents, and that seemed to go pretty well for me and my brothers and sister. None of us had died and no one lost an eye, although having said that I do have a scar on my knee from falling off a bike, and I also nearly cut off my little brothers finger in a gold-sluicing machine. Long story. It should be noted, however, that neither of these two misfortunes was my parents fault.

If you try to be a good parent you will go mad, die, or simply turn into a painfully boring person. The rest of us will find you very annoying. You will show off little Tarquins extraordinary ability to poke out his tongue, and we will secretly wish youd just shut up. We will look at you and, even though we will be smiling and nodding, secretly we will be thinking that you are a big fat pain in the arse.

We will feel sorry for your children.

Good parents, in the modern sense of the phrase, are plain painful. So instead of telling you a hundred different ways to become one of the Stepford parents, and therefore a hundred different ways to feel guilty and inadequate, this book gives you the skinny on how to be a plain old parent.

Trust me, its better this way.

Ever get that feeling? You know the one I mean: when youre so angry with your kids that you can actually feel the blood throbbing in the major arteries that supply your brain? This is an alarming sensation, because you know that its probably the kind of feeling people get just before their brain bursts and squirts out their ears as they collapse lifeless to the ground.

This feeling is the first time you realize your children have the power to kill you out of sheer, unadulterated, unsustainable frustration. This is the first time it dawns on you that actually you might be the one who doesnt make it.

Having said that, on a bad day the idea of instant death from brain explosion might not seem like such a bad thing.

They wind us up, our little ones. We love them, but oh how they wind us up sometimes. Its worse if there are two. If there are two youre in real trouble brain-wise, because they hunt in packs. If there are two, they will stand one each side and let you have a double dose. It might be whining, it might be endless questions, it could just be inane little-kid banter. Whatever it is, you can be sure that two is definitely worse than one.

I remember about a month ago I became so angry, so enraged, at the ridiculousness of the latest dispute between my two boys that I actually had to go lie down. My head was pounding as the blood rushed about looking for somewhere to go. I could feel the arteries that supply vital parts of my brain creaking under the strain.

And what caused all this? From memory it was a completely insane dispute over an empty cardboard box that had been lying around largely ignored for the past month. On that particular day, though, it was the most valued, most prized possession in the entire world, and they both wanted it with the self-same passion that Gollum wanted the Ring. There was shrieking, and demanding, and pleading, and shoving, and the repeated blows thrown from one to the other. The utter ridiculousness of it, combined with the length of time the whole thing went on, almost killed me.

We all end up in that place sooner or later, and sadly most of us will make a large number of return trips over the years. We all get angry at our children, and sometimes the anger is so intense we become slightly dizzy, and we hear a high-pitched ringing in our ears. If you dont go there from time to time, youre probably not spending enough time with your children.

Having said all that, its a dangerous place to be, because if you stay there too long it will literally take years off your life. So here are my top three tips for trying to go there less, and getting out quicker when you do.

Get a plan The big reason most parents feel enraged is because they feel powerless, because theyre at the end of their proverbial tether, because nothing theyve done has made any difference up until that point. Most of us dont want to be angry: we just end up feeling that way because its the last refuge of a sane mind. The utter helplessness of being ignored by tiny little people is inherently enraging.

So you need to get a plan.

The plan doesnt have to be complicated. In fact, the best plans are the simplest ones. Just figure out where things start going pear-shaped, figure out what the little person is getting out of behaving that way, and then figure out how you can make them think again.