For those of us with older children, the last couple of weeks have been all about exam results- we had ours here in Scotland last week, and England’s A-level results came out this week.  And these results mark another new chapter in my ‘parenting life’ for me (what a godawful expression, I do apologise.  At least I didn’t call it a ‘parenting journey’!), and that’s got me thinking about all the different stages of life I have been through with my children so far, and how on earth I have got here.

Sometimes I see someone, usually a smugly smiling middle class woman, but occasionally a smugly smiling middle class man, sitting on a sofa on Lorraine or This Morning, or beaming out of the pages of a newspaper, and claiming to be a ‘parenting expert’.  Almost invariably this ‘parenting expert’ will turn out to be not a highly qualified child psychologist, or a teacher, or any sort of childcare professional, but rather someone whose entire qualifications to style themselves a ‘parenting expert’ is to have two children under the age of four, usually called something suitably middle class like Persephone and Gulliver.

 This ‘expert’ will blithely proclaim that sleep training is the best/ worst thing to do a child, that tutors to start primary school are a must/ child abuse, that potty training must be accomplished by the age of two/ twenty two or you are a failure as a parent for starting too late or too early, or trying too hard, or not trying hard enough, or being too pushy or being too laid back.  And so the list goes on.  You know the gist.  You’ve all seen them, and probably thought, exactly as I do ‘Oh shut up, love.  Just because little Jocasta was born shitting straight into your Porcelanosa bog and slept through the night from conception and just loves loves loves yummy homemade kale chips and spontaneously vomits in the supermarket at the sight of a Petit Filous or a bag of Wotsits (not that parenting experts shop in supermarkets, of course, they frequent artisan farmers’ markets where they let their precious cherubs stick their grubby fingers in the over priced cheese and lick the organic lychees and sneeze over the sourdough), and Baby Noaben (‘we simply couldn’t decide whether Noah or Reuben was more middle class so we combined them!’) aged six months looked you straight in the eye and declared ‘Maman, je suis a la recherche du temps perdu,’ and has hysterics if he sees a screen, crying ‘Non, Maman, non!’ (the screen obviously being held by some other dreadful proletariat baby), there is a great deal more to bringing up children than the preschool stages, and actually, I don’t think there is such a thing as a ‘parenting expert’, so shove that up your kale cleansed colon.’

Of course, there are people who are experts in child development, like the aforementioned psychologists and teachers and childcare professionals, and of course those people can offer useful tips for helping your children to manage their behaviour and emotions appropriately, but ultimately, every child is so different that I don’t think anyone can claim to be a ‘parenting expert’, because ‘parenting’ covers such an enormous swathe of situations, knowledge and skills, each child requiring something slightly different to the next, that it is simply not possible to be an ‘expert’ in everything required for parenting.  Take my own children- as a newborn, my daughter loved being swaddled, and screamed when she wasn’t.  My son hated it, and fought it with all his might from birth.  My daughter was a terrible sleeper and eater, my son was an excellent sleeper and eater.  My daughter was an amenable toddler that you could reason with.  My son…was not.  I could in no way have applied the same parenting methods and routines to them both as they were so different.

The differences continued into the teenage years- one moody and secretive and given to door slammings and shoutings; the other (mostly) sunny, chatty, and very open about everything.  At every stage with both of them though, I have found myself feeling like I am starting anew, and learning how to deal with them all over again.  You crack the baby stage and suddenly they are toddlers, and then they are starting school, and you are wrestling with homework and the endless evenings sitting with the reading books, gritting your teeth as they spell out ‘C.A.T.  C.A.T.  I don’t know what word that makes.  C.A.T.  Is it…‘dog’?’  And then they start secondary school, and you are worrying about drugs and bullying and mental health and sex and internet grooming and wondering- when is it going to get easier?  When am I going to master this ‘parenting’ thing? 

But before you even feel like you’ve got a grip on ‘parenting’ these children, they are sitting exams and you are shouting at them to study, because these exams are IMPORTANT, and then you are consoling them when the results come in, because these exams that three months ago were SO IMPORTANT, aren’t really that important, darling, don’t worry about it.  They are filling in their UCAS forms and the first born just sends it off without even showing you it, and a couple of years later the youngest spends hours working on it with you, and then you are in IKEA buying the entire basic range to send them off to university, or you are sitting beside them in a car, trying not to scream as they hurtle into the path of a grey Transit van on Auchinairn roundabout (sorry, Mr Van Driver, sorry about that) as your foot stamps for an invisible brake pedal.  You find yourself texting them threatening to message their flatmates on Instagram if they do not respond immediately to let you know they are alive; or you are trying to stop them from having a breakdown in Marks and Spencers because the roundabout incident has them convinced they are going to fail their driving test tomorrow, and you think, surely soon I will get the hang of this?  Surely it can’t be long now before I know what I’m doing here? 

You never know though.  You never know what you’re doing, you never know if what you have done or said was the right thing to do until much later.  There is no expertise to parenting, there is only doing your best, and trying your hardest, and crossing your fingers, and loving them, and being there for them, and trying to make them eat some vegetables and hoping.  Hoping they turn out OK.  Hoping the M&S breakdown doesn’t scar them for life, or that time you totally lost your rag with them for no reason because you were under so much pressure.   Hoping they will be happy.  Hoping they will be resilient (see the M&S breakdown and the rag losing).  Hoping your best was good enough.