Every Sunday, I make the same mistake.

Bedding gets laundered; towels need washing and drying. It’s underwear washing day. But most important of all, school uniforms need to be ready for ironing when I get up at 5:30.

And every Sunday, without fail, at 10:30pm, I am still up, waiting for the tumble drier to finish so I can put the last load of school shirts in to dry while I catch some ZZzzzzzz.

It’s because every week, without fail, I start the laundry on Sunday morning.

Why can’t I start on Saturdays? I am educated to postgraduate level; I manage staff; my IQ was once measured at 143 – just one point away from an offical rating of Genius (laugh and I’ll kick your shins!) But I still leave things until it is too late; I still do all my best work at the last minute, when the pressure is on, and when I need sleep.

I think it is because the deadlines are too early.

Tiny Flirt has just lost his first tooth. So he was told to put it under his pillow and, as he carefully instructed us, we emailed the Tooth Fairy. (Don’t you just love 21st Century children?)

Here we hit a snag. Tiny Flirt has started sleeping under his bed – and the tooth was not put under the pillow he was sleeping on. No – Tiny Flirt, a great fan of the Horrid Henry books, had hatched A Plan.

The tooth was under a pillow he had hidden somewhere in his room…

When I picked the kids up from school this evening, I was in a pretty foul mood.

I had just had a long conversation with Darling Wifey during which "dawning realisation" happened: a job I volunteered for at work turns out to be one that will involve a couple of weeks of all-nighters. Not a fun thing to discover.

So the poor kids, who charged across the school grounds shrieking "Daddy!" when they saw me, were rewarded for their playfulness with a snarl and Radio 4 at full volume.

However, by the time I had listened to the news of Boredom Frown being stabbed in the back by yet more of his own Party Faithful, I was feeling a lot more cheerful. It also occurred to me that picking up the kids and singing Sponge Bob Square Pants in the car on the way home was one of the high points of my life – so I cheered up and started chatting nicely with them.

Darling Wifey phoned again, asking me to pop into the supermarket on the way home and, wracked with guilt for my Grumpy parenting, I told the kids I would buy them treats. Little Madam chose two books, Little Nutter found two train DVDs in a bargain bucket, and Tiny Flirt nearly wet himself with excitement when I said he could have a chart DVD. What followed was an almost embarrassing outpouring of daddy-adoration that lasted until the moment we walked in through the front door.

Since then, our home has been creepily silent. The kids just vanished and haven’t bothered us since.

Guilt is good.

Today, Little Madam & Tiny Flirt went to Prize Day, and their school bade farewell to Year 8.

Three classes, just 45 children (or thereabouts) were saluted by the headteacher, applauded for their achievements, and commended to the college across the valley in a ceremony that was part Tom Brown’s Schooldays, part Monty Python skit, and completely in love with the children.

The Head Teacher fulfils the sterotype thrust upon him with style: a prep school head needs to be a towering intellect who presents the appearance of having rejected the Chair of Somethingorother at Oxford in order to satisfy his unquenchable thirst to nurture children rather than just coach people in exam technique. His self effacing humour isn’t just witty and slightly cruel to himself; it is also erudite, sharp as Occam’s Razor, and as well-founded as any Thomist thesis.

As you would expect with any decent school, the table heaved under the weight of trophies, shields and books won in fair fights between the students during the past academic year. But before the celebrations came a naked confession from the Head Teacher: how we recognise and address our weaknesses is as important as how we achieve and celebrate our victories. What followed was an analysis of the breakdown of trust in our society that would have won him the next election – if he hadn’t lost Page 7 of his speech somewhere between the cloudburst that brought a premature halt to morning coffee on the East Lawn and his arrival at the podium. Perfection, as I am sure he knows, is not achieved at any number less than 7.

One thing that this school has not lost, however, is that the pursuit of excellence is distracted when the doctrine of “All Must Have Prizes” takes hold. No-one present in that hall this morning was in any doubt of the Head Teacher’s pleasure in seeing every last one of the students present, his obvious infatuation with each individual, and his painful pride in handing them over to the Head Teacher at the College.

And the girl who took all but one of the subject prizes, two music prizes and one for something else, needing at least three trips to the podium to collect all her cups, shields, books and certificates and still leaving some behind for her parents to deal with – this girl received nothing more or less than an applause for her academic and musical achievements. She got more prizes than anyone else. That cannot be denied.

But not a single person in that hall this morning thought that she was valued, loved or appreciated one iota more than any other child there.

This is a thought-provoking story: Clarissa Williams, the president of the National Association of Head Teachers, wants parents to stay at home with their children rather than pay for pre-school child care. Apparently, La President believes that nurseries teach children to be aggressive.

Oh yeah? Prove it or shut up, you wimp!

erm…

Actually, it’s not a story. It’s yet another opinion spouted by yet another gobshite, blaming "other people’s lifestyles " for all of society’s problems. In effect, she is lumping all the recognised problems of our age together with things that she doesn’t like. She’ll be blaming chewing gum and earrings next…

The truth is that there is no link between early years child care and either crime or academic prowess. Some studies have suggested behavioural issues are caused by nursery care, others have indicated vastly superior emotional intelligence and pronounced academic advantage are the result. The one thing that all these studies have in common is that they don’t differentiate at all between good and bad childcare providers. And the reason for that is it is very difficult to agree on what makes good childcare provision.

The best childcare any of my children received allowed them to crawl on their bellies through woods to find minibeasts; fall out of trees; drive go carts down steep hills; sort out disagreements with friends the old fashioned way; and come home every evening covered in mud, cuts & bruises, torn clothes and a huge smile. Meanwhile, my bosses at the Department for Children, Families and Schools are issuing guidelines on every topic you can imagine to tell you how to raise your children – because they think they know best. And none of the above is allowed in a state-run educational establishment.

The thing is, the government doesn’t have all the answers. It doesn’t know best – and neither does Clarissa Williams.

They have opinions. And what seems to set their opinions apart from everyone else’s these days is that their opinions appear to be gut reactions, rather than informed by quantifiable and verifiable research. And I’m afraid that just makes them look like fools. But I don’t mind that.

What I really object to is hearing someone with an opinion and a little bit of power steamrollering their ill-informed views over the rest of us.

Little Madam finally got her own iPod today.

“How do you get it to rewind?” (It gets worse.)
“Press the ‘back’ button,” I answered. She turned it over.
“There isn’t a button on the back!“

This afternoon, after 24 hours of almost constant purgation of the family’s excessive consumption, the dishwasher threw a hissy fit.

“E 6″ it announced, mysteriously, on its display. And it gurgled ominously but still refused to drain. Probably because the Christmas Soup in its innards had congealed into a solid, sticky lump of roasting tray contents, soggy vegetables and the occasional wayward cork.

Serves it right for overeating. I would never overindulge in such a shameless way.

On the way home with Little Nutter this evening, we stopped at a shop for some milk.As we were walking back to the car, he bounced on his feet and said, “That was so much fun!” As anyone who knows what his communication was like even as recently as last year will agree, it is a miracle. Then, when I got home, Tiny Flirt sat on my knee and read his reading book to me… 

This report from the BBC is interesting: parents are prepared to lie to get their children into a good school.

Incredible, isn’t it? Having done the Water Cooler thing with the report, and asked colleagues and friends, I have to say that no-one is surprised or even dismayed by it. It is regarded as one of the travails of 21st Century family life.

And compared with the same people’s reactions to the information that you pay fees for your children’s education, it’s considered to be positively virtuous.

Using deceit and dishonesty to get an advantage for your children is socially acceptable. Good, old-fashioned hard work and self sacrifice is socially unacceptable.

You tell me who has the problem.

The Daily Torygraph has just wasted another wad of column inches on the Institute for Public Policy Research’s 2006 conclusions that Britain’s teenagers are the worst behaved in Europe, and the UNICEF calculation that our children had the lowest scores for well-being in the developed world.

I don’t think that they wasted the column inches because I disagree with the conclusions, but because I disagree with the reasons they claim are behind this unfortunate social trend.

It turns out that these two reports have not roused the nation into action to help and support our troubled youth.

No. It has instead roused the nation’s tub-thumping know-it-alls to saddle up their hobby horses and gather a thought police posse to hunt down some outlaws.

Who are the outlaws this time? Let’s start with the people who don’t feed their children “real food (as opposed to processed junk.)” There’s nothing like a nice, clearly limited definition free of emotive spin to help support a rational argument, is there?

Second group to be strung up are the parents who deprive their children of “real play (as opposed to sedentary screen-based entertainment.)” Later in the same article these same parents are berated for refusing to stay at home while their children go out to play. And yes, this is an article complaining about children being left to roam the streets, unsupervised, to misbehave an cause trouble. Heaven forbid that the solution might be to send the kids to a safe ‘play activity’ – that’s chequebook parenting, that is! We can’t have that!

The third group of bandits are those who don’t support the need for “real education (not just the pursuit of test results and targets.)” I wonder if this Daily Telegraph columnist has read the Daily Telegraph’s articles on education recently?

And finally, most evil of all, are those parents who don’t have time to raise their own children because they are too busy earning the money to pay nursery fees.

What kind of arse-ended thinking is that? Are we to believe that our nations ASBO youths are the brats of hardworking middle-class parents who paid for the professional, structured learn-through-play early years curriculums that academics, the government and, yes, Daily Telegraph columnists were so loudly praising only a decade ago?

Where are the statistics to correlate antisocial teens with parents who work for a living? Produce the proof or get off your hobby horse.