Bad Parenting: Column From the Bearpit

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Bad Parenting
I was accused a few weeks ago of being a bad parent - because I was trying to shepherd home a distressed child who had been frightened by something at school that day. (A giant animated giraffe, if you must know - don't ask!) I was too taken aback to respond at the time, particularly as I was more interested in trying to comfort Tamsin than make sarcastic ripostes to total strangers, but I sat down and shook for an hour when I got home, and still feel paranoid every time I walk past that house.
A house is being renovated on the way to school and the man in question, either the project manager or the owner, is often doing things in the front yard at 3.15pm when Angus and I are on our way to school to collect Tamsin, and he's usually still there half an hour later as we wend our way back home. Unfortunately, Angus had been having a militant phase at the time and on several occasions had been having a tantrum in his buggy as I wheeled him up the hill past this man's house. Then I had the incident with Tamsin. They had been visiting a Life Education van at school, and apparently the mascot is a big stuffed giraffe. A model of the giraffe had amused her, but seeing him on an animated film had for some reason upset her. She got quite tearful when I collected her from school, and despite my best efforts to comfort her was still crying as we walked back down the hill. Renovation Man came out onto his driveway and asked me why my children were always crying. I made some facile comment about it being a bad time of day (thinking he was actually being vaguely sympathetic, as most parents are to others having a bad kid day). He replied that his children had never cried and that I must be a bad parent. As Tamsin was quite distressed I just muttered something under my breath and hurried away.
Of course now I can think of all the clever, wonderful things I could have said back to him. In particular, that he can't have been a very hands-on father if he genuinely thought that his children had never cried! And that I wonder how he would have felt if someone had said those things to his wife. The French have a wonderful phrase for those clever things that you think of saying after the event - l'esprit d'escalier, or the spirit of the staircase - in other words, the smart ripostes you think up when you are on the staircase going away from the situation!
This unfortunate incident has had several repercussions for me. I am a complete bundle of nerves every time I walk down that street now, looking straight ahead and determinedly not making eye contact with him if he is in his front yard. I bribe Angus with sultanas to stay quietly in the buggy for that part of the journey (his teeth will drop out, but he'll stay quiet!) I bend over backwards to make sure that both my children are behaving quietly and nicely on the way back from school, for that part of the journey - no mean feat when Tamsin has been up since 5.30am and on the go constantly, and is tired after her day at school. In some cases this has meant condoning behavior that I don't approve of, just to keep them quiet.
Most of all it has engendered an enormous resentment in me! How dare this man comment upon my parenting skills! Particularly as he is a parent himself - how can he truthfully say that his children have never been distressed or had a tantrum? Either his children are so repressed that they dare not show any emotion, or he has spent zero time with them as they grew up.
I'm sure we have all thought things like this about other parents, but if we are wise we never say them. You never know the full circumstances, and the blow to the confidence of the parent in question is incalculable. Parenting is hard enough without gratuitous criticism like this.
At times it feels as though all of society is against the parent. We are accused of bad parenting no matter what we do - if we work outside the home, if we don't work outside the home, and no matter how our children behave. People glare at us if we appear in public with our children - even other parents do! The world is generally not child-friendly, and any child who is not perfectly still and silent is regarded as a nuisance. I sometimes want to shout to the world at large, Who do you think is going to fund your old-age pensions out of his taxes in the future!!!!
To finish on a positive note, I would like to say that in general I have found Australia to be very child-friendly and tolerant, far more so than Britain. It is a pity that we tend to dwell on the bad experiences!

Judy Edmonds was born in England, grew up in Australia and is married to Graham Peters, a fifth-generation Australian. From 1990-1999 they lived in England - it was meant to be a two year working holiday but it took on a life of its own. They returned to Australia in May 1999, and are enjoying readjusting. Judy worked as an academic librarian until the birth of Tamsin in 1993, and since then has been a full-time mother to her and to Angus, born 1996. She is now embarking on a new career as a freelance journalist. Her writing can be found all over the Internet now, and she is the owner/editor of an Australian parenting EZine, Chloe & Jack.