In September 2013, after a prolonged period of doubting, mental deliberation and build-up, I ventured on-line and bought myself a domain name: Shrinkgrowskids.com. It was meant to keep me busy while the children were in school because finding employment in school hours only is impossible. I psyched myself up. I was about to start writing when the following happened:

• my daughter broke her leg (she was 6 years old and too little to use crutches. We have a typical Victorian townhouse on 3 floors. She needed hoisting everywhere. I put my back out)
• my dad got diagnosed with cancer (thankfully now in remission)
• my son had terrible allergies to a list of over 20 food items

There were a lot of hospital appointments. The blog got put on the back-burner. Life’s never easy and there is always an excuse NOT to do something.

I’m glad that I persisted.

In January 2014, I finally got the chance to sit down and blog and this led on some 3 years later to the publication of my book last month. So I wanted to share the following with you:

Remember your dreams and make time to make them happen!

Oh, for pity’s sake!’ I silently cursed.
I had timed the nursery run to a tee and for once we were actually on schedule – until my three-year-old daughter, Molly, realized that her new shoes did not have her name label in them. Disaster! I tried to persuade her that this would be fine for one day and promised to stick the labels in that night; I explained that I couldn’t do it there and then because we would be late for her nursery (and, more importantly, I would be late for a meeting I was due to chair). But Molly out and out refused to see reason.

So I tried cajoling, then bribing, then threatening her. All to no avail. Ultimately I gave in, impatiently got the name labels and grumpily stuck them in her shoes. But by then it was too late. Molly was digging her heels in and her anger wasn’t just about the shoes anymore, but had become an incoherent fury with the world in general. And she was still refusing to put on her shoes. There followed more shouting, this time from me, along the lines of, ‘Now I’m going to be late!’ Reciprocal shouting and foot stamping from Molly ensued, until I realized that physically picking her up, bundling her under my arm and forcibly depositing her in the car was the only way I was going to get anywhere that day.

This was no mean feat. Picture me shuffling sheepishly down the road to the car, praying not to encounter any of my neighbours, Molly tucked under my arm like a log, kicking and screaming, with no shoes on. Simultaneously, my eighteen-month- old son D (Chinese for little brother, which is what we’ve always called him), was clinging on to me like an oversized pendant, his arms wrapped tightly around my neck. Assorted nursery-required paraphernalia was haphazardly piled into two bags, which weighed down so heavily on my elbows that they were cutting off the circulation to my fingers, from which dangled the contentious shoes. I must have resembled a demented rag and bone woman with my assorted wares hanging all over me. Meanwhile, Molly’s ongoing high-pitched wails of, ‘You’re hurting me!’ advertised our approach to everyone in the neighbourhood.

It was on that day of model motherhood that I decided I should write a book about parenting. If this seems perverse, I haven’t even confessed the funniest part of the story yet. About an hour after that little episode, I finally took my seat at the meeting. There I sat, solemnly discussing the effects that ‘compromised parenting’ has on the mental health of children. Believe me, the irony was not lost on me.

You see, I am a child psychiatrist. Handling Molly’s meltdown should have been second nature to me, but it wasn’t. After this humiliating escapade, I started to write down the more ridiculous of my parenting moments, because on one level they intrigued me: ‘Surely a child psychiatrist should know better?’ I kept asking myself.

Before having children I probably considered myself some-thing of a ‘parenting expert’. I doled out parenting advice to parents like hot dinners and wore my, ‘I know about parenting; I’m a child psychiatrist y’know’ badge with pride. It was only when I actually became a parent that I woke up to the humbling reality that there is no such thing as a ‘parenting expert’. Parenting is, in essence, often a process of mainly well-intentioned trial and error. The well-intentioned part is important because in recent times parents have been taking their role in their children’s development much more seriously. We’ve come a long way from the days when children were seen and not heard; when it was fairly common for them to be farmed out to wet nurses, governesses or boarding school at one end of the social spectrum, or sent up a chimney at the other. We now know that leaving the administration of parenting to others means potentially leaving the outcomes

Indeed, sometimes it seems we have gone to the other extreme; there has been such a seismic shift in our attitudes towards parenting. Rather than abdicating responsibility for our children, or being ambivalent, we now have an almost obsessive preoccupation with them. I like to think that this is because my profession has done such a great job at promoting the importance of loving and understanding our children, though cynics might argue that it has more to do with the fact that most of us can no longer afford nannies, governesses or boarding schools. Whatever the reasons, there is no doubt that there is now a genuine interest in giving our children the best possible start in life.

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