THE MUMSNET RULES Natasha Joffe and Justine Roberts
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For our children
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Introduction so what are these rules anyway? Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy, Because he knows it teases. Chorus: Wow! wow! wow! Lewis Carroll, ‘The Duchess’s Lullaby’ from Alice in Wonderland When my first baby was about six weeks old, I panicked about the fact that we seemed to be oozing along formlessly in our life together. He was mostly feeding or sleeping in my lap, the feeding being almost constant and the sleeping occurring in frequent but very short bursts. Neither of us had any sense of night and day. I panicked in particular because I had just purchased a book that looked friendly but which seemed to be telling me I had already messed it all up, that my baby should be eating and sleeping in a certain way and in certain places, and the fact that he was not doing so was a very bad thing – it was hindering his development and my happiness. I am not even sure that the book actually said any of this or at least said it with anything like the firmness I thought it did. I make no claims at all for my intellectual faculties at that time. So I found myself, after six weeks of very little postnatal sleep bolted on to quite a lot of previous prenatal insomnia, doing a mad and awful thing. I put my baby in his cot at what the book seemed to say should be one of his naptimes and I went away and left him there whilst he screamed miserably and continuously, wide awake and understandably outraged. I think I went away for twenty minutes; I fear it may have been longer. I have INTRODUCTION
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erased the details. When I went back his face was glazed with tears and set in horizontal lines of woe like the Duchess’s baby in Alice in Wonderland. I held him tight and wept whilst he continued to sob convulsively. He was inconsolable; I could not console him. The book didn’t actually tell me to do what I did. I just lost it. I thought I was damaging him and myself by allowing us to carry on in the way we were (and funnily enough we weren’t unhappy that way – he was just a tiny baby and I was just a bit strange). I subsequently read another book about abandonment and stress hormones and psychological development and convinced myself that this one incident had psychologically scarred him. Forever. Neither of the books I read helped me to be a better parent or him to be a happier baby. I think many people, like me, found Mumsnet in the early days of our parenting in bewildered retreat from one book or another we had snatched from the shelves, too tired to read it properly, too tired to apply it, too tired to exercise our critical faculties about what it was telling us. Too tired not to feel like we were failing miserably at times. So we found a website. Where other folk told us it was OK to be exhausted, to feel at times like you had the wrong emotions for your baby, to fail to have a routine, to impose a routine if it was right for you and your baby, to make mistakes, as long as you tried to do better next time: that they had made mistakes and life had carried on and their children were fine. And a couple of years down the line, when we couldn’t get a three-year-old out of nappies, we found some ideas for bribes, and a little later some reassurance about the baffling testosterone-fuelled rage of four-year-old boys. And when we had seven-year-olds who went upstairs to get their clothes on for school and were discovered twenty minutes later reading the Beano in their pants, there were other people’s stories to laugh at and their tips to try. Because, at each stage of your child’s development you tend to realise there is a whole lot of stuff you fretted about at the previous stage which you probably didn’t need to. ‘God, I did it all though. But it’s like having a wedding and then realising you should have just eloped or had your immediate family. Once you KNOW you KNOW.’
(codjane) 2
THE MUMSNET RULES
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Which perhaps makes this rules thing seem rather paradoxical. Why rules? If we are in retreat from gurus and experts, if we are saying that there is a broad spectrum of good-enough ways to parent, why do we need rules? And where do they come from? After all, on controversial issues – sleep, feeding, vaccinations, schooling choices – Mumsnet posters often shout in the internet language of capital letters. They occasionally insult one another, they sometimes flounce from the site altogether. So what is the wisdom of crowds, how can there be any rules when everyone is sitting at their computers disagreeing with everyone else? The answer, we think, is this – that by reading a hundred different people’s views on controlled crying, on the contents of party bags, on how to help a child who has no friends, you find that there is usually a commonsense consensus around the important things. But there are also boundaries to what works and what is OK, and sometimes we need a (virtual) village to help us find those boundaries. The Mumsnet Rules maps out both the areas of consensus and the boundaries. And the goal of the Rules is to make you into the person you would be if you had had two or three children to practise on before the ones you actually have. So that when you hear your toddler singing (from the back of the bike on which you are ferrying him to nursery), plaintively and to the tune of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’: ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mum. Mummy, Mummy don’t go to work . . .’, you can laugh a little rather than falling off your bike.i Of course the truth is, looking at Justine’s four children and my three, that we miserably fail to apply most of these rules most of the time. A fact that rather came home to us when we were bouncing the rules off Justine’s twelve-year-old daughter, who variously laughed uproariously and suggested that in respect of most of the rules, the opposite rule would be more appropriate. Or when we had plonked all of the children in front of YouTube in order to get the book finished on time. Or when one of Justine’s children suggested that were he to win the lottery he’d buy his dad a boat, his siblings the contents of the Arsenal shop and his mother a new computer, because that’s what she likes to do. Writing these rules has, to an extent, been like a daily mortification of the parental flesh for us as we confronted our own deficiencies. But what it has not been is a pointless wallowing in guilt of the kind that newspapers and experts sometimes seem to invite. Because what we INTRODUCTION
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hope you will find in this book is reassurance: a buoyancy aid to help you keep your head above water. These rules are about finding your bearings, doing things in ways which make your life a little better and easier, forgiving yourself for being barely adequate at times but recognising when you are heading towards genuine awfulness and learning to put the brakes on. And there is a metarule here, which came to me when my four-yearold, during a complicated conversation about single-sex unions, asked, ‘But if there are two ladies, who will do the driving?’ii And that rule is: when you can, try to take things lightly. Have a cackle at yourself and at all the other parents muddling along beside you, and remember to laugh with – and about – your own children. Because one of the best things of all about being a parent, about living with children, is that it is really very funny. Part of the time. Although not so much when eavesdropping on a crowd of four-yearolds telling poo jokes.
i) This would be Justine, with her fourth child. ii) Justine would like to make it clear that she, however, is a very good and experienced driver. 4
THE MUMSNET RULES
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THE MUMSNET RULES You don’t have to bake with your children Don’t fret about milestones Don’t buy a guinea pig for your child Ignore unsolicited parenting advice from old biddies on buses (get a sense of humour) Don’t give up work for your children Cut all their hair off Let them eat cake Boycott World Book Day Don’t hit your kids (but if you do, try very hard not to do it again) Put away your mobile, turn off your laptop and don’t even think about a Blackberry or an iPhone Have a baby not a birth Lock visitors out after the birth Call your baby what you like
Don’t buy a Moses Basket Don’t heed the gurus You don’t have to ‘get your figure back’ six weeks after the birth Don’t feed your baby in lavatories You don’t have to go to baby groups It’s OK to do controlled crying Don’t let your toddler kick all the babies at playgroup Avoid loud (otherwise known as ‘performance’) parenting Do not be frightened of public tantrums If you prefer his brother, take it to your grave You are not too big to apologise / You are too big not to apologise Don’t overdo the praise / tell your children every scribble is a masterpiece You can’t choose their friends (and you shouldn’t try) Don’t call it a twinkle Tell them they are beautiful (but that beautiful is the least of what they are): Some thoughts on love, appearances and self-esteem Be proud of your geeky child because life isn’t, after all, an American high school movie Don’t get cross with your dreamy child, learn to manage him You don’t have to have a naughty step Manners matter – make them mind their ps and qs
You don’t have to have family meals Let them fight amongst themselves Don’t shame your child up about fiddling but do make them to do it in the bedroom Turn the computer games off Make them do chores and start them young Don’t worry about the imaginary friends (but don’t give them extra cake either) Do not let your child dress like a ho: pink, princesses and other gender-specific stuff Be hypocritical about swearing Let them eat dirt Let them fall over You don’t have to bathe your children every day Keep your poxy or vomiting child at home You must not allow your children to be a safe-house for parasites You don’t have to play Sylvanian Families if you don’t want to Drink wine and hide: The art of ‘playdates’ Chase other people’s children away in public places Don’t hire a limousine for children’s parties Make them write thank you notes Don’t let your kids do martial arts Toddler life: If in doubt, go out
Help your partner be competent to look after your mutual children – otherwise known as: Different is not necessarily crap Do argue in front of the children but do reconcile publicly Be kind to your in-laws Your childcarer is not your friend Do not covet thy neighbour’s grandparents Let grandparents who babysit do it their way (within reason) Choose the best school for your child, not the ‘best school’ (primary variety) Secondary school: Don’t worry if it looks like a prison, they all do Get organized, then feed and leave: Starting school You are not six: Don’t worry about other parents at the school gates They don’t turn into pimps and hos because of sex ed Bribe and corrupt them to get them through exams Just because you’re a parent the world doesn’t owe you a parking space
THE MUMSNET RULES
A Victory for Common Sense ON SALE 6th JUNE 2011
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MUMSNET Created in 2000 by two mothers, Justine Roberts and Carrie Longton, Mumsnet is widely regarded as the UK’s leading online parenting community. It has 2.5 million monthly visitors, and its members are loyal, active and passionate about the site. Fans of Mumsnet include India Knight, Sarah Brown, Dr Tanya Brown and Prime Minister David Cameron.
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Also available from Mumsnet Pregnancy: The Mumsnet Guide Babies: The Mumsnet Guide Toddlers: The Mumsnet Guide
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First published in Great Britain 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Mumsnet Limited The moral right of the authors has been asserted The extract from ‘Babel’ is copyright © Louis MacNeice, from Collected Poems, 2007, Faber & Faber. Reprinted with kind permission of David Higham Associates. The extract from ‘Afternoons’ is taken from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin © The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4088 0848 1 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in Great Britain by Clays Limited, St Ives plc
www.bloomsbury.com/mumsnet
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