Reasons my daughter is being an arse this week…..

Isy - 1 Oct 16

My daughter isn’t acting like a tanked up lad on holiday in Magaluf because she is NAUGHTY. God no, that would be awful. No, she’s biting/hitting/punching/throwing/moaning/ because of one of these following reasons… (select as appropriate to you)

– Appetite. You know that time when you were really hungry and you hit a kid across the face with a plastic plate? No? Oh, that’s weird because it’s a really common side effect of hunger apparently.

– Teething. Oh lovely teething. The blanket excuse for a wealth of unreasonable behavior. Your child isn’t eating their vegetables? Don’t worry, it’s clearly because they are teething, it’s nothing to do with them realising, some months ago, that the green stuff on the plate is tasteless crap and the only thing worth their chewing is beige food. No, no, your little one LOVES kale normally, it’s just that they are teething.

– Developmental Spurt. A kid in a soft play tried to push Dot off a slide the other day and the mum sidled up to me and said, ‘sorry, he’s going through a developmental spurt’. I didn’t blame her, I use it too. Her child was clearly going through that famous cornerstone of children’s developmental spurts, the one when you realise that attempting to murder your peers is preferable to waiting for your turn. The developmental spurt defence, as it should be known, could probably get someone off murder in a court of law. It’s so general and nonspecific that it is the perfect excuse for ANYTHING. I’m seriously considering beginning to use it myself. Next time I shove someone out of the way in the supermarket because they are taking too long, roll my eyes when someone is talking and they catch me, or, get drunk and start lecturing eighteen-year-olds on why they should enjoy their lives whilst their childless, I will walk away and mumble, ‘sorry, I’m going through a developmental spurt’. They will look at me sympathetically and say ‘you poor thing,’ and all will be forgiven.

– Sleep. They got too much sleep? Not enough sleep? The wrong kind of sleep? At the wrong time of day? Well, then you can’t really blame them for repeatedly throwing bits of their jacket potato at the old woman sitting next to them in the garden centre cafe. That’s what we all really want to do when we’re groggy isn’t it?

– Age. Today, at a park, I heard a mum shrug away the fact her child had kicked another child in the head by saying, ‘he’s only three’. Whilst you can stick with the age defence in this situation I think the, he’s-behaving-like-a-twat-today-sorry-about-that excuse is far better received.

– Dad/Mum/Granny/Nursery. Aren’t other people just absolute tossers? I don’t know about you but every single naughty word or bad habit my daughter has displayed she has learnt from other people. Or at least that is what I tell everyone.

– Being advanced. ‘Sorry she doesn’t sit in her high chair anymore. She’s just really advanced, really really advanced and so high chairs seem babyish. She’s so advanced she doesn’t actually need to sit down to eat, she does it standing up. Which, if you think about it, is what adults do if they are really busy. So, it’s actually just her being really clever’.

– Boredom. I don’t really remember what boredom is anymore but I do know I used to have it before Dot. Before I was a mum I was bored all the time, like, ‘I’m so bored of going to that club can we go somewhere else,’ and ‘I’m bored of drinking prosecco shall we move on to gin’. So, from my memory, boredom is a beautiful, wonderful thing only experienced by those who are used to having lots of options. Children however, they get bored all the bloody time, even when they are doing something we think will exhilarate them. This affliction of children of being permanently on the edge of boredom, as if they are bloody Anna Wintour looking on unimpressed from the front row of a catwalk, means they do weird shit. If Dot hasn’t gone out of the house by 9am then I may as well resign myself to a morning of hard trolling. Whilst boredom may make an adult yawn and feel a bit meh, boredom makes children transform into a phone-lobbing, tantrum-throwing Naomi Campbell, ready to tear apart anything in their eyeline. If they are being a real bugger you can merge ‘boredom’ and ‘advanced’ defences and deliver this immortal line, ‘he/she is really clever, they just have to be stimulated all the time or they get bored’.

There you are, your child need never be naughty again, for every badly behaved kid there is a perfectly reasonable explanation!

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Isy

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