Mothers / Chapter 3

 An Ongoing Conversation With

Joyce Bingham, Delphine Gauthier-Georgakopoulos, Megan Hanlon,

Amy Marques, Fiona McKay, Nina Miller, Maria Thomas, T.L. Tomljanovic 

Photograph by Laurissa Booyse

We're told to keep our kids healthy with diet and exercise. Less screen time, more outdoor activities. But those baby/toddler/pre-teen/teenager books and magazines talk about bad behaviour and habits without even wondering why. Why do kids scream for attention? What can we do as mothers, as parents? What about values and morals?

Delphine: When I became a mum, I binge-read child psychology books because I wanted to break unhealthy patterns and be the best mum I could be. I binge-read French, British, and American case studies. I mostly agreed with Françoise Dolto until I didn’t, compared the culture I came from to the one I gave birth in, and the one I moved to and chose to raise my kids in. It was important to me that they would have morals without cultural/national biases. They could switch to actual food, start walking and talking and potty whenever they felt like, but they would know to express their emotions with words, know right from wrong the universal way, to be kind and honest, and know they were loved—even when I lost my patience, or needed time off to breathe and remember myself.


Maria: I read a load of books but ultimately I felt my way. Adopted some things from my own childhood, discarded others. My parents didn’t limit screen time at all (although ITV was banned more from snobbery than anything else I think) but I could almost always be found in a book. In the early days my kids would get in bed with us and we’d put the Wiggles on and feed them Jaffa Cakes as a way of getting extra time in bed. This rapidly became our favourite time of the day - all four of us snuggled up together. In terms of values and morals I’ve tried to lead by example, be open and honest and encourage discussion. I think I’ve ended up with two pretty stand-up human beings.


Megan: I read the latest news of screen time and interactive play and reading books. But these don’t account for the real lives we lead. It no longer takes a mom all day to wash clothes in a boiling tub of water, or prepare a meal on a woodburning stove. While the laundry is in the machine and dinner in the crock pot, what are we supposed to do with the child all day? My patience, imagination, and energy have limits. I remember reading somewhere that babies love to stare at faces, so I ripped a handful of full-page ads for perfume and jewelry from magazines. My first baby and I laid on the floor and stared at faces for a few hours, because I didn’t know what else to do with him and I was too tired to leave the house. This was not the motherhood I had pictured. As my children grew I tried to instill some of the values I hold most important: honesty, consideration, appreciation, resiliency, and love. But these same values are now viewed as “woke” or “weak” in America. Empathy is considered a disease by leaders of government and business. We’ve turned individualism into selfishness, media algorithms into echo chambers that reverberate with only what we already like and agree with. I want my children to be kind and open, and I’m worried that the world outside is going to eat them alive before they get a chance to really live.


Nina: I grew up feral in my own way. A child that played outdoors until the sun went down. That was a tomboy who played with boy’s toys and liked to wear jeans whose knees were worn thin from skating injuries. Skin on asphalt, scars that built character. This feral child was tamed by gender stereotypes and parents who wanted me to fit a certain mold. I held that feral beast within as I navigated myself into adulthood. As a pediatrician, my mother enforced healthy eating, limited screen time and safety gear. Everything I was taught was by the book and appropriate for how parents should raise children. But when I was raising my own daughter, I looked at those rules as cages and wanted my own little feral beings to thrive. I talked about food as choices we make, not rules to be enforced. That screen time was a privilege to be earned by good behavior and not a right. That gender is a construct, though the tomboy I thought I would have was into dresses and makeup and all that I eschewed as a child, but I did not dare tell her she was anything but perfect to me. I learned to lead by example and mother my children with an approach that allowed for their voices to shine. I had the ability to be strong and demanding when the situation warranted but still able to apologize for my parenting blunders when they occurred.
My son is neuroatypical, to that end, any rules went out the window as I learned to parent someone who interacted with the world with a different set of engagement. Where screen time was self soothing and evening dinners were tactile nightmares for him. I learned that flexibility is built into the mother verb and here too I learned to adapt and grow and become a stronger parent for the lessons he taught me and still teaches me to this day.
What my mothering has thus shown my children is the value of listening to other POV, of respecting people's choices but understanding the consequences of our actions. With having a child with special needs comes a hefty dose of patience, empathy and kindness born out of shared experiences and mutual affection, love and care. Those years are behind me now, but we all grew stronger and as a mother, what more could I want for my family.


Amy: Yeah… I think a lot of the “shoulds” mess up the “must” or the “coulds”. I think part of surviving motherhood has, for me, learning to ask why and why not for any given random rule. More often than not, we can shift how we do things. To the point that I’ve turned it into a mantra of sorts: whenever possible, change the rules, not the people.


Joyce: In restaurants I would look at messy children covered in ketchup and swear mine would never do that. I think this is the most common idea pre-children. I wasn’t an Earth mother but I did want my son to have as good nutrition as I could manage. It was carnage. If ketchup all over his food would make him eat it then so be it. He ate yoghurt, carrots and bananas. Chips with ketchup. That was it. After researching we rearranged all our meals around one small human. We served everything in dishes so you could help yourself. It did help, but when I moved house many years later, I was astonished at the number of serving dishes I actually owned. Even now I look adoringly at cute dishes, but thankfully I remember to never buy them. When we ate out, I would order an alternative dish that I could easily swap with my son. It meant that for many years I always ate his second choice. It was a revelation when I could choose my own meal and not sacrifice it for the hideous meal he didn’t want.


Fiona: I always qualify anything I say on behaviour by saying ‘but I only had one child so I could give her the attention she needed when she needed it’, and I think this does make a huge difference. When she was younger, we didn’t know she was neurodivergent, but there were signs - I spent a lot of time rehearsing social interactions with her, so that she wouldn’t be anxious. I spent huge amounts of time talking to her, and always talked to her as if she was another adult, as I really didn’t know any other way (my own neurodivergence, probably), which led to her having a very wide vocabulary. In terms of picky eating - which seems to annoy non-parents, and parents with children who aren’t picky - I think it’s true to say that most children go through a picky phase around the age of two and when this happened, it was a thing to be addressed for sure. At the time, my husband was off work, and I was taking afternoons to work on writing. He would give her dinner at around six pm and do the bedtime and reading. I would then come down and make our dinner for around eight pm. But my solution to the picky eating was to have sit down dinner for all three of us at six pm. This cut short my working time, but we were lucky that it had the effect of our daughter becoming an adventurous eater, who enjoyed being taken to good restaurants from the age of three. Her face, though, the first day she realised that we were all eating the same thing and she had no option - I could see her working it out in real time. She does still hate asparagus though, so clearly the ‘rule’ that introducing a food to your child fifty-eight times will result in them eating it is not true!
One of my favourite parenting memories is being in a crowded shopping centre on a bank holiday weekend, and my daughter got upset after being in a shop for longer than she wanted while I was buying something. I got her out to a quieter place, got down to her level and checked in with what she needed in that moment. Was she hungry? Thirsty? Did she need the bathroom? I gently asked her to tell me what she needed first, and we would go and do that. She stopped crying and An older woman came over to me and said ‘I just want to tell you you’re a great mam, the way you talked to her there,’ and it was the loveliest compliment I ever got. Again, I just had one kid to deal with - if I had three, I doubt I would have been able to be calm and present.

T.L.: Both my kids were good eaters as babies and toddlers, which my husband and I took 100% of the credit for as it was obviously our excellent cooking skills and superior parenting that made it so. Then they got older and pickier and pickier and pickier, which is what we deserve for our hubris. Every stage of my kids’ development has its pitfalls and triumphs. While the healthy diet wasn’t a struggle for my family, screens are another beast entirely. Grandma (my mom) inadvertently introduced my kids to screens when they were babies; she bought us an iPad when my son was born because we lived in different provinces and she wanted to see her grandson regularly via FaceTime. My son became obsessed with the iPad as an infant. He’s now a teenager and his sister is a pre-teen and they would both spend the entire day on screens if we let them. While we have restrictions, I worry about the studies coming out on screen addiction, social media dangers, and the mental health complications that accompany living so much of our lives online. I don’t think taking away devices is the answer, but the constant monitoring and adjusting to make sure my kids aren’t spending too much time online is a tightrope act and one I fail at again and again.