A CHILD is one of the Great Bunyip’s wonderful cosmic jokes, as anyone who sets out to raise one comes quickly to understand. Parents-to-be, especially mothers, spend inordinate amounts of time contemplating all the good and worthy influences they will bring to bear on their little ones, only to find that, just like war, no well-laid plan survives its first encounter with the enemy. Such has certainly been the experience of a close friend, a rock-ribbed libertarian lady who grapples daily with the shame of having produced a lad who covers his bedroom wall with posters of woebegone polar bears, melting glaciers and demands that the Hazelwood power station, irreplaceable source of 25% of Victoria's electricity, be closed and razed. The evening meal has become a torment of surly silence and snarling contempt, the discord several times reducing her to tears and her hubby to threats of violence. She did everything right, as did her Liberal-voting partner, yet their child appears determined to make idiocy his vocation. As the boy draws close to his fifteenth birthday she has come to realize there is nothing to be done but go zen, bite her tongue, wait patiently and hope that the late arrival of good sense will save him from a life of mung beans, public transport and the myth of the clean, green perpetual motion machine.
Just now taking the first delighted steps down parenthood’s road, fellow blogger Lucy Tartan is determined to raise the perfect child, and she has drawn up a list of quite explicit rules to achieve that goal. “I've more or less settled upon a core set of principles,” explains a confident Lucy, whose son, .Leonard Elvis, entered the world a little over a week ago. Here’s what little Lenny can look forward to:
FORBIDDEN
- plastic toys, brightly coloured ones in particular
- voting Liberal
- tv in bed
- going to church (at the first sign of teenage experimentation in this direction I will say "here is $500, have a party with your friends instead.")
- joining any sport which doesn't allow girls to play in the same contests as boys
- especially, going anywhere near the local football club
NOT FORBIDDEN, BUT NOT ENCOURAGED EITHER
- eating meat
- drinking Coke
- getting a dog
- working at McDonald's
- finding anything remotely amusing about Charlie Sheen
- doing after-school activities (music lessons etc) which require me to drive him to the place of the activities or do anything else organisational
REQUIRED
- table manners, including the ability to recognise implements of cutlery and use them for the purposes for which they are designed
- not writing or saying singular 'they' indiscriminately
Good luck with all that, Lucy, especially the last rule, routinely violated these days by people who should know better – reporters, sub-editors and educators in particular. If Lucy’s plan falls apart, as it surely will, she might want to consider swapping her own progeny for the troublesome teen mentioned above. There would be no common genes, but it does sound as if they are made for each other.
