Nigel Latta - Before Your Kids Drive You Crazy, Read This!

For my mum, Janice Latta.

She knew all this stuff long before I ever did.

The names and identifying details of people mentioned in this book have been changed to preserve their privacy.

For more information and resources visit Nigels website: www.goldfishwisdom.co.nz

One could be forgiven for thinking that, somewhere between about 1982 and 1992, they started making kids from different stuff to all the previous generations of kids that had gone before. Up till then, kids were kids. They fell over, got dirty, played with their friends, and did all the kinds of things that kids had always done. They rode in cars without triple-certified child carseats, walked to school by themselves, played in playgrounds with concrete paths, lived in houses without those little plastic plug point guards, and ate stuff with truckloads of food colouring in it with mad abandon.

Its a wonder the human race made it through those reckless decades at all.

Somewhere after that, however, we all started to lose our way. Life got busier and more complicated. Soon we had mobile phones, desktops and DVDs. The people who sell shampoo and the like decided there was a thing called Generation X, who in their turn decided they didnt want to decide about anything. Now I think were up to Generation Z, and the people selling shampoo are still trying to make soap sound like rocket science.

Soap is soap, people, lets not forget that. It isnt really honey extracts and aloe: its soap.

In amongst all that, kids seem to have been getting steadily more complicated and apparently more delicate. You could be forgiven for thinking the poor wee bunnies were made of glass, the way some people talk. Somewhere along the way some sandal-wearing hippy started calling kids young people, and its all been pretty much downhill from there.

In addition, every time you turn on the television, Dr Fudge-buffer from the University of Poomfahfah is telling us about some new research which clearly demonstrates were all basically crap, and our children are doomed because were so crap.

The other day we had a meeting with my eldest sons new-entrant teacher. My son is a great wee man and I love him to bits, but hes also as stubborn as a mule thats been genetically altered and had a super-stubborn gene welded onto the toughest chromosome in the bunch. (After extensive and very complex psychological testing, I have concluded he gets this from his mother.) Hed been having a few settling-in issues with his teachertesting her limits and the likewhich is simply how he does business. My boy is a fence-rattler. His teacher is greatvery experiencedand was on to him from the start. My wife and I breathed a sigh of relief when we first met her because we knew she was the best first teacher we could have had for our guy. So, halfway through this meeting, I suddenly tumbled to the fact that she was diplomatically asking our permission to discipline him in class when he pushed too far.

I told her she had our full confidence and she should do whatever she thought was right. Put him in a box in the cupboard if you think itll help get the message through, I said, hoping she knew I was joking and didnt think we actually did that at home. I also told her that, if he came home saying his teacher had been mean to him, we wouldnt be ringing her up whining about how shed upset our little angel. Wed ask him what hed done in the first place.

Its absolutely barking mad that teachers feel they need to ask parents permission to discipline children at school. They do, of course, because the whiny brigade will ring the school as soon as their dear little ones get home, anxious that poor wee Tarquins self-esteem may have been irreparably damaged.

Teachers needing to ask if they can discipline kids? Weve really lost our way.

Sometimes Tarquin might actually need a metaphorical boot up the jacksie, so to speak.

Everything has become so bloody complicated. Many of the simple pleasures are being eroded away because were so frightened, anxious and self-doubting as parents. Were all desperately worried about screwing it up and making our children emotional cripples.

Heres the thing though: we all screw it up in one way or another. Were parentsthats our job. Just as we have to survive them, our kids have to survive us. If they can make it past us, theyll probably be fine. Think of it as a form of social natural selection. Raising kids is the greatest form of reality television there is, just without the television. The other downside is that you cant vote people off, which is a bit of a shame. You also dont get a million dollars at the other end. You do, thoughif youre half-decent and a bit luckyget some pretty nice memories with which to grow old.

Keeping pace with all this complication and preciousness has been a host of books and documentaries telling you all about how you should raise kids to minimise the chances of turning them into emotional cripples. You can buy books about how to raise the smartest kids, the most confident kids, the most creative kids, the most free-spirited kids, and every other kind of kid you could ever think of.

Bollocks to all that. This is not one of those books.

This book is about how you can get through the first ten years of your kids lives without going nuts. Its not easy to raise kids and stay sane, but it can be done. It is possible, hard as that might be to believe. If, however, you only want to know how to raise little Tarquin and Portia so they can play Mozart on the piano-accordion at age four, then this book is probably not for you.

If, on the other hand, you want to find a way to get through the first decade without going barking mad, then this book is for you.

Although heres the weird thing: even though this book is about you and not how to raise a baby Mozart, youre actually more likely to raise a balanced, happy, smart kid if youre not crazy.

The crazier you are, the less well they tend to do.

The happier you are, the happier they will be.

Its a simple rule, but its an important one. In fact, I think its the most important rule of the whole damn lot. You must stay sane at all costs.

My job is fixing kids. Simple really.

I work with all kinds of kids, but I especially enjoy working with the kids who end up in the too-hard basket. I like those kidsI like them a lotand I like that basket. The little people who end up in that basket have an ability to knock the wind out of the world in a way you just cant help but admire. If youve got a ten-year-old whos defeated every expert whos ever been put in front of him, thats a boy Id like to meet. The kid who can make a room full of shrinks shake their heads in dismay is a kid Id like to get to know.

As a result Ive spent the past fifteen years travelling around the country working with all kinds of kids with all kinds of problems. Ive seen them all: the rudest, the meanest, the scariest, the angriest, the saddest, and also the nicest.

There are worse jobs.

A while back I was driving home after visiting one of my families. Things with this particular family had been pretty dire at the beginning. When I first met them, the eldest daughter, aged ten, had been in an in-patient ward for young people with extremely disturbed behaviour. She was admitted after she had tried to kill herself. It wasnt a serious attempt on the face of it, but then how serious does a ten-year-old have to be? Her younger brother, still at home, was off the wall as well, throwing tantrums that were very loud, and very aggressive. Mum was a good soul but at the end of her tether. Things were falling apart.