honey we’re killing the kids (BBC3)
Don’t often get custody of the remote control so this is the first time I’d seen this. It really struck me that something somewhere has gone very, very wrong when the BBC needs to get in there and tell parents how to provide the basics for kids. I know non of us ever “gets it right” all the time, or even most of the time but how have we got to the point where families really don’t know how to be a family?
I’m not saying against this 1 family, they had the guts to go on national TV and fess up to how they weren’t managing. I’m sure that wasn’t an easy thing to do.
I just felt that somehow in the drive to be accademically, proffesionally and any other -ally successful we have forgotten somehow that we need to be people, we need to be family and we need to work at that as hard if not harder than all the other successes. I don’t think we have it any more right now than the sort of 1940s housewife scenario of having a pristeen home and putting on something pretty for the Man of the House to come home to. Somewhere there has to be a middle ground wehre one or both parents can work if they want to and not be condemned but where they still have enough left to give to each other and to the kids. Where there shouldn’t be a need for one parent to work all the hours God sends in order to keep a roof over the family heads at the cost of never seeing that family. And where a “stay at home parent” isn’t seen as a slacker, someone who failed in the workplace so “just” stays at home for the kids but somehow is never really there for them.
If I succeed at nothing else with home educating Becca I would like to think that she will leave home equiped to cope on her own. I’d like to think she will have the foundations there to build on with understanding how important good food is, how important enough sleep and down time is, how vital it is to look after yourself physically, mentally and emotionally and how to look after her family the same way. I’m no terific parent. In fact a lot of the time I’m pretty crap at it becuase in all honesty I dont’ know how to be any different. I think the TV tonight hit just the right, or wrong, nerve not becuase of how that family were failing but because it made me think about how my family fails and how I’m responsible for a lot of that failure.
I’m tired, I need more sleep, I need to get a grip but I needed to off-load this before it festered or worse just got brushed back under the rug and forgotten. Now I just need to work out how I deal with it. and that’s not going to happen overnight.
