THE MUMSNET RULES

THEMUMSNET

RULESNatasha Joffe and Justine Roberts

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For our children

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INTRODUCTION 1

Introductionso what are these rules anyway?

Speak roughly to your little boy,And beat him when he sneezes:He only does it to annoy,Because he knows it teases.

Chorus: Wow! wow! wow!

Lewis Carroll, ‘� e Duchess’s Lullaby’from Alice in Wonderland

When my Q rst baby was about six weeks old, I panicked about the fact that we seemed to be oozing along formlessly in our life together. He was mostly feeding or sleeping in my lap, the feeding being almost constant and the sleeping occurring in frequent but very short bursts. Neither of us had any sense of night and day. I panicked in particular because I had just purchased a book that looked friendly but which seemed to be telling me I had already messed it all up, that my baby should be eating and sleeping in a certain way and in certain places, and the fact that he was not doing so was a very bad thing – it was hindering his development and my happiness. I am not even sure that the book actually said any of this or at least said it with anything like the Q rmness I thought it did. I make no claims at all for my intellectual faculties at that time. So I found myself, after six weeks of very little postnatal sleep bolted on to quite a lot of previous prenatal insomnia, doing a mad and awful thing. I put my baby in his cot at what the book seemed to say should be one of his naptimes and I went away and left him there whilst he screamed miser-ably and continuously, wide awake and understandably outraged. I think I went away for twenty minutes; I fear it may have been longer. I have

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2 THE MUMSNET RULES

erased the details. When I went back his face was glazed with tears and set in horizontal lines of woe like the Duchess’s baby in Alice in Wonderland. I held him tight and wept whilst he continued to sob convulsively. He was inconsolable; I could not console him. � e book didn’t actually tell me to do what I did. I just lost it. I thought I was damaging him and myself by allowing us to carry on in the way we were (and funnily enough we weren’t unhappy that way – he was just a tiny baby and I was just a bit strange). I subsequently read another book about abandonment and stress hormones and psychological development and convinced myself that this one incident had psychologically scarred him. Forever. Neither of the books I read helped me to be a better parent or him to be a happier baby. I think many people, like me, found Mumsnet in the early days of our parenting in bewildered retreat from one book or another we had snatched from the shelves, too tired to read it properly, too tired to apply it, too tired to exercise our critical faculties about what it was telling us. Too tired not to feel like we were failing miserably at times. So we found a website. Where other folk told us it was OK to be exhausted, to feel at times like you had the wrong emotions for your baby, to fail to have a routine, to impose a routine if it was right for you and your baby, to make mistakes, as long as you tried to do better next time: that they had made mistakes and life had carried on and their chil-dren were Q ne. And a couple of years down the line, when we couldn’t get a three-year-old out of nappies, we found some ideas for bribes, and a little later some reassur-ance about the bac ing testosterone-fuelled rage of four-year-old boys. And when we had seven-year-olds who went upstairs to get their clothes on for school and were discovered twenty minutes later reading the Beano in their pants, there were other people’s stories to laugh at and their tips to try. Because, at each stage of your child’s development you tend to realise there is a whole lot of stuL you fretted about at the previous stage which you probably didn’t need to.

‘God, I did it all though. But it’s like having a wedding and then realising you should have just eloped or had your immediate family. Once you KNOW you KNOW.’

(codjane)


INTRODUCTION 3

Which perhaps makes this rules thing seem rather paradoxical. Why rules? If we are in retreat from gurus and experts, if we are saying that there is a broad spectrum of good-enough ways to parent, why do we need rules? And where do they come from? After all, on controversial issues – sleep, feeding, vaccinations, schooling choices – Mumsnet posters often shout in the internet language of capital letters. � ey occasionally insult one another, they sometimes e ounce from the site altogether. So what is the wisdom of crowds, how can there be any rules when everyone is sitting at their computers disagreeing with everyone else? � e answer, we think, is this – that by reading a hundred diL erent people’s views on controlled crying, on the contents of party bags, on how to help a child who has no friends, you Q nd that there is usually a common-sense consensus around the important things. But there are also boundaries to what works and what is OK, and sometimes we need a (virtual) village to help us Q nd those boundaries. � e Mumsnet Rules maps out both the areas of consensus and the boundaries. And the goal of the Rules is to make you into the person you would be if you had had two or three children to practise on before the ones you actually have. So that when you hear your toddler singing (from the back of the bike on which you are ferrying him to nursery), plaintively and to the tune of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’: ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mum. Mummy, Mummy don’t go to work . . .’, you can laugh a little rather than falling oL your bike.i Of course the truth is, looking at Justine’s four children and my three, that we miserably fail to apply most of these rules most of the time. A fact that rather came home to us when we were bouncing the rules oL Justine’s twelve-year-old daughter, who variously laughed uproariously and suggested that in respect of most of the rules, the opposite rule would be more appropriate. Or when we had plonked all of the children in front of YouTube in order to get the book Q nished on time. Or when one of Justine’s children suggested that were he to win the lottery he’d buy his dad a boat, his siblings the contents of the Arsenal shop and his mother a new compu-ter, because that’s what she likes to do. Writing these rules has, to an extent, been like a daily mortiQ cation of the parental e esh for us as we confronted our own deQ ciencies. But what it has not been is a pointless wallowing in guilt of the kind that newspapers and experts sometimes seem to invite. Because what we


4 THE MUMSNET RULES

hope you will Q nd in this book is reassurance: a buoyancy aid to help you keep your head above water. � ese rules are about Q nding your bearings, doing things in ways which make your life a little better and easier, forgiv-ing yourself for being barely adequate at times but recognising when you are heading towards genuine awfulness and learning to put the brakes on. And there is a metarule here, which came to me when my four-year-old, during a complicated conversation about single-sex unions, asked, ‘But if there are two ladies, who will do the driving?’ii And that rule is: when you can, try to take things lightly. Have a cackle at yourself and at all the other parents muddling along beside you, and remember to laugh with – and about – your own children. Because one of the best things of all about being a parent, about living with children, is that it is really very funny. Part of the time. Although not so much when eavesdropping on a crowd of four-year-olds telling poo jokes.

i) � is would be Justine, with her fourth child. ii) Justine would like to make it clear that she, however, is a very good and experienced

driver.


THE MUMSNET RULES

You don’t have to bake with your children

Don’t fret about milestones

Don’t buy a guinea pig for your child

Ignore unsolicited parenting advice from old biddies on buses (get a sense of humour)

Don’t give up work for your children

Cut all their hair off

Let them eat cake

Boycott World Book Day

Don’t hit your kids (but if you do, try very hard not to do it again)

Put away your mobile, turn off your laptop and don’t even think about a Blackberry or an iPhone

Have a baby not a birth

Lock visitors out after the birth

Call your baby what you like

Don’t buy a Moses Basket

Don’t heed the gurus

You don’t have to ‘get your figure back’ six weeks after the birth

Don’t feed your baby in lavatories

You don’t have to go to baby groups

It’s OK to do controlled crying

Don’t let your toddler kick all the babies at playgroup

Avoid loud (otherwise known as ‘performance’) parenting

Do not be frightened of public tantrums

If you prefer his brother, take it to your grave

You are not too big to apologise / You are too big not to apologise

Don’t overdo the praise / tell your children every scribble is a masterpiece

You can’t choose their friends (and you shouldn’t try)

Don’t call it a twinkle

Tell them they are beautiful (but that beautiful is the least of what they are): Some thoughts on love, appearances and

self-esteem

Be proud of your geeky child because life isn’t, after all, an American high school movie

Don’t get cross with your dreamy child, learn to manage him

You don’t have to have a naughty step

Manners matter – make them mind their ps and qs

You don’t have to have family meals

Let them fight amongst themselves

Don’t shame your child up about fiddling but do make them to do it in the bedroom

Turn the computer games off

Make them do chores and start them young

Don’t worry about the imaginary friends (but don’t give them extra cake either)

Do not let your child dress like a ho: pink, princesses and other gender-specific stuff

Be hypocritical about swearing

Let them eat dirt

Let them fall over

You don’t have to bathe your children every day

Keep your poxy or vomiting child at home

You must not allow your children to be a safe-house for parasites

You don’t have to play Sylvanian Families if you don’t want to

Drink wine and hide: The art of ‘playdates’

Chase other people’s children away in public places

Don’t hire a limousine for children’s parties

Make them write thank you notes

Don’t let your kids do martial arts

Toddler life: If in doubt, go out

Help your partner be competent to look after your mutual children – otherwise known as: Different is not necessarily

crap

Do argue in front of the children but do reconcile publicly

Be kind to your in-laws

Your childcarer is not your friend

Do not covet thy neighbour’s grandparents

Let grandparents who babysit do it their way (within reason)

Choose the best school for your child, not the ‘best school’ (primary variety)

Secondary school: Don’t worry if it looks like a prison, they all do

Get organized, then feed and leave: Starting school

You are not six: Don’t worry about other parents at the school gates

They don’t turn into pimps and hos because of sex ed

Bribe and corrupt them to get them through exams

Just because you’re a parent the world doesn’t owe you a parking space

THE

MUMSNET

RULES

A Victory for Common Sense

ON SALE 6th JUNE 2011

ORDER YOUR COPY ONLINE: WWW.BLOOMSBURY.COM/BOOKSHOP

MUMSNET

Created in 2000 by two mothers, Justine Roberts and Carrie Longton, Mumsnet is widely regarded as the UK’s leading online parenting com-munity. It has 2.5 million monthly visitors, and its members are loyal, ac-tive and passionate about the site. Fans of Mumsnet include India Knight, Sarah Brown, Dr Tanya Brown and Prime Minister David Cameron.


Also available from Mumsnet

Pregnancy: � e Mumsnet GuideBabies: � e Mumsnet Guide

Toddlers: � e Mumsnet Guide

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First published in Great Britain 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Mumsnet Limited

� e moral right of the authors has been asserted

� e extract from ‘Babel’ is copyright © Louis MacNeice, from Collected Poems, 2007, Faber & Faber.Reprinted with kind permission of David Higham Associates.

� e extract from ‘Afternoons’ is taken from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin © � e Estate of Philip Larkin. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

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THE MUMSNET RULES