Does being a parent make you a better DSL?
As a DSL, you spend a lot of time working with parents and carers. But if you are a parent yourself, how does it influence how you think and act in your job?
*NB1 This article contains references to families or children. The details in these descriptions are completely made up, but used to represent underlying truths that have come from real experiences I have had in my work.
*NB2 In this piece I talk about being a parent. I realise that there are loads of people out there who do not consider themselves parents, but are nevertheless doing all of the hard work that parents do to bring up children, including some step-parents, older siblings, grandparents and foster carers. At work I am a bit obsessed with recognising this, and being careful to not just talk about ‘Mums’, ‘Dads’ or ‘parents’ (e.g. we call ‘Parents Evening’ ‘Grown-Ups Evening’ at our school). But for the sake of this piece I’ve just gone with parents to make it easier to read: if you one of those amazing non-parent people that cares for children then please forgive me!
Does being a parent make you a better DSL?
Obviously the short answer is no. DSL’s who are parents aren’t necessarily better than DSL’s who are not, and vice versa. There are DSL’s with six children of their own, and DSL’s without children, all of whom do their jobs with just as much drive, skill and empathy as anyone else can. But in some cases becoming a Father or a Mother may make individual DSL’s better at their jobs. Or worse. And that’s what this piece is going to be about: my own experience of being a DSL who is also a parent. This isn’t really about whether having your own children makes you a better DSL, so much as it is about how it has influenced me personally as a DSL. So please don’t take offence at anything I say here, I’m just talking about me, not you. As ever, if your experiences are different – or the same – I’d love to hear from you so do get in touch. Anyway, with that big caveat in place, here goes…
The memories are fuzzy, but I can vaguely recall the feeling of slowing down at the start of the school holidays. It was the time before I had children of my own. I think I would have had a lie in on that first Saturday. Then, as the days passed, my brain would drop down through the gears. I might even start to do things like ‘relaxing’ or ‘unwinding’. Who knows, during the longer holidays – and this feels like it might just be my memory playing tricks on me - there might be times when I might actually just 'potter about'. That was then. When there weren’t three little people on the planet who call me ‘Dad’. When I sometimes thought I was busy (but I wasn’t) and I sometimes thought I was tired (but I really really wasn’t). And those days are certainly over. Long gone. This is now. And now? Now I don’t need an alarm clock because my youngest daughter very reliably wakes me up before 7am. She doesn’t like me to waste the day so she makes sure to do this at weekends and during school holidays too. Now 7.15am is a lie in. Sometimes she’ll start the day with sitting on the sofa watching TV which is nice. Other days it starts with ‘playing’. This involves me pretending to be a dinosaur/shopkeeper/customer/obstetrician (current favourite) and cannot be done with anything less than 85% enthusiasm. This pace will then continue throughout the day, as my three children take it in turns to keep us busy (I swear they have a rota), until 8.45pm when story time is finished. Me and my partner look forward to the last hour of the day, because we get to kick back and talk about who’s going to do the drop-off tomorrow and whether the car insurance renews automatically. Basically, when you’ve got kids – young kids especially - every waking hour of every single day feels like an episode of The Crystal Maze: frantic action, always up against the clock, spinning plates and trying to get the chicken across the river without it being eaten by the fox or it pecking up all the grain. Yes, now that I’ve got a family of my own, I sometimes go back to work after the school holidays thinking it’ll be nice to slow down a bit!
Ok, I know that if there’s one thing people hate more than teachers who chose to work in schools moaning about how hard it is to work in schools, it’s people who chose to have children moaning about how hard it is having children. So I’ll put the violins away: my children are literally the best things in the world. I’m not exaggerating. They are hilarious, incredible things that all have the ability on any given day to make me feel like I’m the luckiest person alive. But in amongst all of the madness they bring with them, have those little people made me a better DSL, or a worse one?
For starters - if I’m being completely honest - I have a confession to make that is somewhat taboo. The truth is that I have never cared quite as much about my job and the pupils I work with since the birth of my eldest child. Because in fairness nothing matters quite as much after that moment. Not my job and not my CD collection. Maybe this isn’t true for everyone, but my kids have consumed the vast majority of the psychological and emotional energy I have to care about things, and left less of that for anyone and anything else. The truth is I sometimes look at younger people who haven’t started their families yet and they just look like they care that little bit more, and it gives me a strange feeling. My work still matters a lot to me, but the blunt reality is that when push comes to shove my kids matter more. This doesn’t mean I don’t have times when I feel guilty that I let my job get in the way of being the best parent I can be (“How much longer are you going to be working Dad?”), but in terms of bottom line priorities, my kids rule the roost. I’m not really sure how I feel about all of that exactly, but I do feel like there’s not really anything I could do about it even if I wanted to.
Another big effect is that it naturally gives me a greater degree of empathy with anyone else trying to be a good parent. When I see someone getting out of the car, holding the hand of one child, trying to shove a breakfast bar in the mouth of another whilst finishing off a terse conversation with a third about why it was their turn to sit in the back again, I think ‘great job Mum, all alive and at school on time again, you’re smashing it’. I can still feel frustration with parents that aren’t doing enough for their children. But my instinct now leans much more towards ‘damn being a parent is hard’, and I sympathise with anyone else who – like me – is just trying not to mess it up too much.
Having children of your own also shapes your perspective on different aspects of parenting. Our kids basically live on chicken nuggets (to be fair sometimes on Fridays we mix it up with fish fingers). So, I’m pretty loathe to judge anyone for not making nutritious home made meals. On the flip side we have made a pretty deliberate decision to keep our children off things like TikTok and Snapchat (don’t worry, they get to watch Youtube on their birthdays), so I have less sympathy with people who say there’s nothing they can do about their children’s online behaviour. Headlice? That’s a nightmare. Your kids won’t brush their teeth? For some reason my three have never complained, you just brush their teeth, what’s the big deal? Getting them to sleep through the night? We thought this was a doddle with our first kid, then with our second one it was like we were trying to train an angry gorilla to play the harp. As a parent I have definitely discovered that SLEEP IS EVERYTHING! (Unless one of your children is unwell, and then nothing else matters in the world, including sleep). But otherwise sleep is the key to everything, for you and for your children. If I could do one thing that would instantly make our school better in loads of different ways, it would be to make sure that everyone in it has always had enough sleep.
Anyway, these personal biases are obviously silly. The point is, when I’m talking to parents or carers now I get it in a way that I simply didn’t before.
That sympathy for parents has also brought with it the biggest downside I have experienced as well though. There has been at least one very significant instance I know of when I let my sympathy for a parent blind me to the realities of the life of their child. I was working with a family and fell into the trap of thinking far too much about how hard things must be for the Mother, and not enough about how hard things must be for her daughter. It was simply far easier for me to empathise with someone roughly my age trying to bring up a child, than to empathise with a little person trying to go to school, watch My Little Pony and deal with things they shouldn’t have to be dealing with. It’s a mistake I think I would have been a lot less likely to make before having children of my own. It’s a mistake I made despite having the words ‘Always Ask What Life Is Like For This Child’ up on the wall in my room. Crucially it’s a mistake I hope I’ll never make again, but I know that the danger is still there.
Being a parent also provides you with a level of authenticity that I definitely think helps in some aspects of my work. When you can look someone in the eye and say “I’ve got kids of my own, so I know how I’d feel”, that can be a powerful tool. When I didn’t have children of my own, I was very aware of that fact whenever I was talking to parents about their parenting. I have got so many advantages as a parent: financial stability, a tireless partner, a good support network, decent mental health and a positive childhood to act as a rough guide. But even when I’m talking to people without all of those advantages – people whose strength and determination can be truly humbling to watch – I can still connect with them on what it’s like when your child throws up in the middle of the night, and there’s vomit in their hair (because it always goes in the hair), and you’ve got to decide whether you need to try and put them in the shower now, or if you can leave it until the morning.
The other thing that comes with being a parent is some real practical knowledge that I would never have got without having a family of my own. It feels nice when you can recommend a really good cheap baby monitor. Or tell someone that there’s a cinema that does half-price screenings on Thursdays during the school holidays. No one likes a know-it-all. But when someone tells you about something – anything - that makes your life as a parent easier, well that’ll make you love them forever. And if I’m still doing this job in 15 years time, I’ll be a bit sad when all of my tricks and tips have become out of date and I’ve no longer got that first hand experience to share.
So as I said, those are some of my own personal experiences and reflections. My final thought - and again it’s something that I’ve only appreciated since trying to raise my own kids with someone else - is how truly incredibly amazing some of those ‘single parents’ are out there, whether they are DSL’s reading this, colleagues you know, or parents that you work with. I do not know how they do it?!? Watching men and women (and let’s be honest, it’s mostly women), tirelessly pour the required amounts of effort, time and love into children that were created by two people but are – for whatever reason – being raised by one, can be truly humbling. If you are one of those people then you are a legend. If you know one of those people then try and find a non-patronising way of telling them that they are a legend. Because in my experience kids are great at a lot of things, but recognising the heroic efforts of their Fathers and Mothers isn’t always one of them.
Right, got to go, someone has just dropped a bowl of cereal in the living room…