Parents · call recap
What we say at the table
16 July 202411 attendedHeld by Wren
Eleven parents, and the practical problem is always the same: you still have to cook, you still have to sit down, and children are extremely good at hearing the rules the adults are following. We spent the first half on logistics and the second half on language, and the second half is the one people came back to me about afterwards.
The logistics
Cooking food you cannot face. Toby has stopped cooking from want and now cooks from the list, like a job he is reasonably good at, and eats a small amount of it. Bobbie plates hers up and eats it an hour later once the smell has left the kitchen. Poppy has a small fridge and three people's food in it and has simply given the box a corner and stopped thinking about it.
The school run in a bad week. Birthday cake. A roast nobody wants to admit they cannot face. All solvable, all easier once somebody else has said it out loud first.
The language
This is where I get careful. What a child hears is not the sentence, it is the rule underneath it. I am being good. I have been naughty today. I am not allowed that. None of those are about the parent, once a nine-year-old has heard them forty times.
Nuala said the thing that changed the hour. Her son has started commenting on his own body, and she cannot tell whether he got it from her, from school, or from a screen, and the not knowing is what keeps her up. Nobody in the room could answer that. What four people could do was describe what they had changed about their own sentences, which is the only part any of us controls.
Where we left it
With a plain answer to the question that gets asked here most: what do you say when your son asks why you are not eating your dinner. The answers the room liked best were short and true and did not moralise. My appetite has changed because of a medicine I take. I have had enough. I will have some later. Nothing about being good.