Child chill out

>> Teaching your kid to mix a Manhattan and other parenting tips from Christie Mellor

by JULIET WATERS

Last week, I unleashed chaos by grabbing the wrong Darth Vader lunch box from my son’s first grade locker room. Turns out this Darth Vader box held the essential keys to another child’s successful first night as a latchkey kid. I learned every detail of the ensuing crisis from his mother, who recounted the story in a frantically-pitched Parisian accent.

I felt bad, but not entirely responsible. On this side of the Atlantic, seven is considered a little young to be made responsible for keys, let alone oneself. Still, nothing quite cheers a North American mother more than evidence of more questionable parenting than her own. So I allowed myself a little nostalgia, and even some admiration for good old-fashioned negligence.

I wasn’t much older the year my mother took me along on a research trip to London, handed me a guide book and a tube map and made no plans to see me between breakfast and dinner. She wasn’t alone in this practice. A Kid’s Guide to London was specifically written for children, with suggestions for places they might actually want to bring their parents. Christie Mellor shares some of my nostalgia in The Three-Martini Family Vacation: A Field Guide to Intrepid Parenting. She recalls a recent story about a Danish couple that was arrested for child abandonment when they decided to pop into a bar for a drink and left their infant parked outside in a stroller.

“A New York City sidewalk is perhaps not the optimum spot to leave one’s infant unattended, and this may be an extreme measure to ensure a little grown–up time, but the basic idea is very civilized, and were it not for crowded streets and those few bothersome child abductions that take place once every few years, wouldn’t it be just lovely to park one’s child and slip into a warm café for some quiet time?”

Mellor’s last book, The Three-Martini Playdate, was an argument in favour of retro parenting. Not the sentimental baking brownies kind, but the unsentimental drinking drinks kind. That old-fashioned parenting where adults have adult time, kids have kid time, and a good way to combine the two is to teach the kids how to mix you a good cocktail. In Mellor’s first guide, pre-schoolers learned how to mix a competent martini; in this sequel, they learn how to mix a visiting mother-in-law an extra stiff Manhattan

Mellor’s tone is tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely. It’s inevitable that there be some backlash to the over-vigilant, over-indulgent, over-invested parenting that is breeding more needy, neurotic, whiney, attention-addicted kids every year. The kind of kids that few parents would want to take outside of the house. The kind of kids that, to be honest, might be better off left alone in the house, or at least in a separate room for extended periods.

Another of Mellor’s strong points as a parenting expert is her respect for people who don’t have kids; kids who have never learned to entertain themselves quietly and safely, who have never learned to respect adult time or adult space, who aren’t restaurant friendly, or party friendly, let alone vacation friendly. Europeans seem to have a better handle on this than North Americans. Kids there are generally expected to adapt to adult life, and not the other way around. Though free-market capitalism is doing its best to convince them otherwise (enter Euro Disney and obesity), many Europeans stubbornly retain the idea that maturity is actually good for kids.

Martini recipes notwithstanding, Mellor’s advice is generally healthy and very funny. It’s a return to frugality, resourcefulness, maturity and wit: “We may worry about the state of the planet, but perhaps we should worry as well about the children we are unleashing upon it. Think of your offspring as your own little global climate zones, and deal with their unfettered brattiness before the polar icecaps of your sanity begin a permanent meltdown.”

The Three-Martini Family Vacation
by Christie Mellor, Chronicle, pb, 159pp, $12.95