Queen Bees and Wannabes

I can't remember where I picked up Rosalind Wiseman's classic 2002 book about teenage girls, Queen Bees and Wannabes, which informed the making of the equally classic movie Mean Girls. It might have been around the time that I was writing novels for the Girlfriend Fiction series; I'm pretty sure that my own daughters were not teenagers yet, and I wanted all the information I could lay my hands on.

Re-reading Queen Bees and Wannabes at least a decade later, my children have passed through the teen years (well, almost -- the younger one is still technically a teen for a few more weeks) and I can appreciate how much influence this book had, not just on my writing, but on my parenting. Even though it was written before the tsunami of social media crashed over us all, before the strains of lockdown life, and before new awareness of neurodiversity and gender fluidity, there is so much wisdom in these pages. The key messages -- like keeping lines of communication open, no matter what -- are just as helpful now as they ever were.

Much of the focus of Queen Bees is on helping your child to navigate the social hierarchy of high school, and some of it does have a particularly American slant. In this edition at least (I believe there is a revised version available now) there are some glaring gaps like the ones mentioned above, but the heart of the book hasn't changed much. Wiseman insists that the most important priorities are to build and maintain trust, establish boundaries, model the behaviour you want to see. She is realistic about the issues that teenage girls face and the limits of what parents can control. Better to equip your child to solve her own problems rather than march in and to fix everything for her.

It was a relief to put this book down and realise that, despite often stormy waters, maybe we didn't do such a bad job after all.

Are We Nearly There Yet?

 

Ben Hatch's 2011 bestseller, Are We Nearly There Yet? arrived in a mystery box of books that Elder Daughter and I treated ourselves to earlier in lockdown. When I chose it from the box, I thought it might be a mildly diverting companion to Bill Bryson's Road to Little Dribbling, another amusing travelogue of Great Britain. But it proved to be much better than that.

Hatch's account of travelling round the UK with his wife and two kids (both under four) researching a family-friendly guidebook is definitely amusing. The usual tribulations of parenting young kids (lost toys, food meltdowns, poo and vomit) are added to a punishing timetable that can require up to four or five 'attractions' per day. Add to that some darker episodes, including a serious car accident, inexplicable pain and hospitalisation (Ben has a kidney stone), and raking over the marital coals as their travels lead them down memory lane to the sites of childhood holidays, first houses and first jobs.

But the real gravitas of this book is provided by the illness and death of Ben's father which unfolds over the months of their trip. Sir David Hatch joined the Cambridge Footlights at the same time as comic luminaries like John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Graeme Garden, but he diverted into producing, becoming a BBC bigwig. Young Ben rebelled against his larger-than-life father, and his reflections on this rebellion and their ultimate gradual understanding (not explicit, because they are English, after all) is the most moving strand of this story.

Ben Hatch has also written several novels, one of which was published this year. With his impeccable comic timing, ear for dialogue and acute observational skills on display in this memoir, I'm interested to see what he's come up with.

Parenting from the Inside Out

Another parenting book! Parenting From the Inside Out by Daniel J Siegel and Mary Hartzell comes highly recommended (by Gwyneth Paltrow) and has been in print for over a decade.

But... I have to say that this book wasn't quite as helpful as the last. There were long chunks of text explaining the science behind the psychology, which made my eyes glaze over. My favourite sections were personal examples from the lives of the authors of where they had failed as parents -- this was reassuring and relatable, and if the whole book had consisted of these stories, I would have enjoyed it a lot more.

The theory covered a lot of ground that I was already familiar with, which is my own fault for reading so many of these damn books.

I'm relieved I only borrowed this from the library and didn't actually buy it.

Attachment-Focused Parenting

Our family has been travelling a bumpy road over the last couple of years. I won't go into detail, but it's been (being) a pretty rough ride. So I am up for any help I can get!

You might think that with children of (nearly) 18 and (very nearly) 15, I would be putting my feet up and relaxing on the parenting front. No way! If anything, this game gets harder and more complicated the longer you stick at it. In many ways, Daniel A Hughes's book, Attachment-Focused Parenting, has been very reassuring -- a lot of stuff that we've done by instinct turns out to have professional approval (phew!) But it's never too late to add a few tools to the toolkit, and I've found this book very helpful in suggesting alternative strategies, or holding back when necessary.

The heart of the book is the PACE strategy of building relationships with your children (or any children, or adults, for that matter). PACE stands for Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity, Empathy -- all underpinned by L for Love: an unconditional commitment and pleasure. At its core, PACE recommends accepting and sitting with your child in their difficulties, rather than jumping in with solutions, lectures, discipline or punishment. Sometimes, as a parent, I've found holding back is the hardest skill to master.

Highly recommended for all parents, new or not-so new.