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Available for over a year

One of the advantages of not being a father is that I feel under no compulsion to send annual updates in Christmas cards extolling how my parental skills have shaped offspring of whom the nation should be proud and all other parents envious. This is not to say that I am disinterested in children or child-rearing; quite the contrary. Single people can sometimes objectively recognise in the families they visit what makes for good parenting and well-adjusted children. And one thing which I have observed is that there are some domestic practices which help to minimise the risk of children getting in trouble or even developing some of the physical, psychological and social disorders of which we are all too aware. I'm thinking of slightly mundane things like diet, exercise, and ‘interest’. I say ‘interest’ because that is what from an early age attests the worth of children and builds their trust. A few years ago this was underscored by a talk I heard from a health professional in Cumbria. She was speaking to parents who wanted to know how best their children could be prevented from taking illegal drugs. Her answer sounded remarkably - almost naively - simple. Not ‘show them a scary drug awareness video’, but ‘ensure that you always sit together as a family for dinner and talk with each other about the day’. I know teachers who would wholeheartedly endorse that, especially one who reckons that in most of the classes she teaches over a third of the pupils, from across the social spectrum, never routinely eat at a table with parents. Instead they sit in front of a screen or loll in an armchair. And, never sharing interesting and interested conversation in the home, they become socially awkward elsewhere. The importance of mealtime family conversation is wonderfully enshrined in the Jewish Passover where it is a young child who asks questions of adults regarding the purpose and symbolism of the meal. And the importance of dialogue between adolescent and adult is affirmed in the story of the young Jesus at a Passover in Jerusalem engaging in conversation with the elders in his tradition whereby they ask him, an eleven year old, as many questions as he asks them. Human interest, which is a life-enhancing ‘preventative’ medicine, costs nothing but time.... time which is a sign and gift of love.