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And Then They Stopped Looking…

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 26/10/17 18:00
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I have no qualifications to allow me to write a blog or to share the experiences that I share here. You can double that up against the fact that I have absolutely no qualification or right to tell anyone else how to parent their children or live their life, but I can share experiences and offer suggestions from the experiences that I have had.

If anybody reading this has ever followed the blog for long enough you will understand what made me start to write a blog of my own. It was a column in the Evening Standard that I read on the train home from London once written from a relatively young Dad who was trying to balance the stresses and strains of being a Dad, a husband, trying to be good at my job, be fit, be a metrosexual, attractive and all of those things as it’s impossible to be do that, certainly as a collective.

It taught me that boys want to be pirates and girls want to be princesses and nothing you can do can change that, it also taught me that that smell is ‘always what you thing it is.’ It spoke out to me because I was in the same place as that writer; him and I thought I had things that I could share.

When the cloud comes down, when I’m too busy and I can’t see my own hand in front of my face, I don’t see the things that are important and the things that I should be learning from on a day-by-day basis.

But there are other days where it’s clear, and one of them days was last Sunday.

My 9 (soon to be 10) year old son Callum had two friends over for a sleep over on Saturday night. They did the usual boy sleep over thing of eating too much junk, watching movies and playing on the Play Station until a ridiculous hour. On Sunday I took them all to a cool swimming pool with flumes and waves etc. but because they’re getting independent now they didn’t want me to come in with them. They wanted to go in on their own and just be able to see me from the edge as I sat working instead of enjoying myself.

We do this don’t we? We ‘work to provide’ for our children. The man gives us money to buy iPads, subscriptions to Netflix and package holidays. Trips to restaurants to feed our children poisonous things that they become addicted to, contributing to the world wide epidemic of obesity; then we’ve done our job. We’ve paid ‘our contribution to society’ because we have raised children just like us.

Parenting is a social experiment, different in every family’s case. It’s an almost impossible recipe to replicate because it’s a heavy mix of ego, character and values. To try to be good at parenting is to sacrifice yourself but it’s no different to any other form of self-sacrifice. Trying to be good at your job, trying to be good as a partner or trying to be good as a sportsman. It is all self-sacrifice.

My son has access to iPads, computers, Netflix and the rest of that stuff but on Sunday morning with his friends he stayed in the swimming pool for 2 and a half hours.

On the first pass round he looked up to see if I was there taking the reassurance that a nearly 10 year old would, making sure his Dad hadn’t broken his promise but at almost every other pass he didn’t.

Callum is the youngest of three, Grace and Rosie already stopped looking.

On Sunday Callum started to stop.

You can go to work, to earn the money to buy them an ipad whatever age they are but they will only look for so long and then they won’t look anymore.

‘Where you invest your love… you invest your life’ Mumford and Sons.

 

Blog psot number: 1441

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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