I don’t think anyone is the parent they want to be.

Before I had my kids – Saoirse, four, and three-year-old triplets Thady, Frank and Orla – I thought I’d be one of those yummy mummies ferrying her beautiful and gifted children between violin and ballet classes while an organic something or other slow-baked in the Aga.

What this fantasy failed to address is that I am, at heart, a working-class bird whose idea of after-school activity is letting them veg out in front of CBeebies until the chicken nuggets are done.

And with four kids under school age, I barely have time to wipe their snotty noses – let alone coach them in their piano scales or the finer points of Chinese grammar.

But I don’t think I’d hothouse them even if I was a posher middle-class mum because a) I’m very lazy – who wants to be driving them to art classes when Homes Under The Hammer is on?

And b) I think the best way to bring up kids is to almost completely ignore them.

Kids these days clearly get far too much attention – and what good has it done them?

They are fatter, lazier, whinier and more tooled up than ever before. It can’t be a coincidence that today’s hoodies were yesterday’s pampered tots.

Some of the most irritating, slappable brats I know come from families where the parents constantly shower them with attention.

Wrong.

Tell them to bugger off and make their own fun.

My kids have learnt how to play all day while me and their dad read the papers/watch telly/get on with stuff around the house.

Forced to entertain themselves in the difficult hours between stuffing themselves with biscuits nicked from the cupboard and bedtime, they have discovered the joys of totally spontaneous play.

Remember that?

It’s what we used to do when we were kids.

Long summer days when you got so bored you’d think of something to do out of desperation.

As the summer holidays loom and parents go mad trying to organise their kids into oblivion, my children will be doing what they always do – finding worms then flinging them at each other, filling all the vases in the house with talc, painting each others’ nails with my pink varnish (especially the boys), watering the rabbit, pretending to get married, running away from imaginary witches, making daisy chains, drawing tattoos on each other, fighting, spraying each other with the garden hose, substituting song lyrics with the words “poo”, “wee wee” and “bogies”, fighting a bit more, then jumping up and down on the trampoline until they either fall off or throw up.

They love it.

At the end of the day they look like refugees from a war zone – bruised, filthy and punch drunk.

In short, like proper kids.

True, they might end up with ASBOs and a cider problem, but they’ll have had loads of fun getting there.

 

What’s the secret to bringing up children? Do you think children get too much attention these days? What did you used to do during the summer holidays as a child and how has this changed for children today?

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Photography: Brian Moody/Scope