Take A Vacation From Parenting And Enjoy Your Children

What would have been considered selfish behaviour 15 years ago has been transformed into “Me” time.

But does this turn family life into yet another chore?

Jennie Bristow acknowledges that sometimes everyone needs a break from pitter-patter of little feet, especially when it is followed by a loud crash, a yelp and a torrent of tears.

Women have been told for the past decade that they are over-worked and need to take time for themselves. That a stressed out mom is the very worst kind and that by caring for themselves they are actually caring for their families.

However, she argues in The Great Myth of Me Time, this has the effect of making parenting another chore, instead of the joy it ought to be.

But there is something disturbing about the way in which family life has become so intensely pressurised that parents feel they need somehow to liberate themselves from its demands — or at least, to be given time off for good behaviour. How has it come to this?

Perhaps Me time just treats the symptoms and not the disease?

Parenting has become the latest and most cut-throat of competitive sports and Bristow thinks that we ought to cut ourselves some slack. We should worry less about whether our children are having an active learning experience at the grocery store, or about the effect of the music in the car on their IQ.

The natural worries of parenting are compounded by experts who make their bread and butter telling parents that they don’t know how to parent, and that unless they buy this product, they will be doing it wrong.

Unfortunately, the demand for me-time only fuels the sense that we are at loggerheads with our children. The idea that “I need more time for me” implies a conflict of interest between parents and children: an us and them situation in which time needs to be consciously divided into time “for them” and time “for me”.

Her answer is to focus on the family as a whole and not just the children. Household chores need to get done, even if the kids get nothing out of it other than a clean house to live in. If parents stop looking at family life as yet another job, it will turn the 5pm shift into a break from the toils of the day.

“We should reclaim the sense of our families as a place where we can be ourselves, warts and all — rather than somewhere that we struggle to be the “perfect parent”, and then have to escape in order to “be me”.”

That does sound relaxing. Now hand me my sweat pants and a glass of wine. Time to bond as a family in front of the TV.