What’s the secret of successful parenting? Like most middle-class parents, I don’t just want my children to be happy. I want them to have proper careers as well. I’d like each of them to go to a Russell Group university — ideally Oxford or Cambridge — and then do a further degree. If they win a scholarship to do postgraduate work at Harvard or Yale, so much the better. And I want them to achieve all this without spending a penny on their education.
The only parenting guide I’ve ever read is Andrew Gimson’s biography of Boris Johnson. You won’t find it in the ‘Parenting’ section of Waterstone’s, but it’s a font of useful information nevertheless. After all, Boris’s father Stanley has sired six children, all of whom got into Oxford. Not only that, but all the Johnson children are astonishingly successful. What’s his secret?
Stanley emerges from the book as a British version of Joe Kennedy. Like Joe, he constantly exhorted his children to pit themselves against each other, devising an inexhaustible series of competitive games. In the process, he transformed them from happy-go-lucky tykes to ruthless go-getters. Here’s Julia Johnson’s account of her father’s parenting technique: ‘My father has six children, of which I am the last but one, and as long as I can remember there have been cutthroat mealtime quizzes, fearsome ping-pong matches, height, weight and blondness contests, and, of course, academic rivalry of mind-numbing magnitude.’
Some people might shiver at the prospect of being brought up this way, but I have done my best to duplicate Stanley’s approach. Any number of routine chores have been tricked up into cutthroat competitions, including getting dressed in the morning, finishing your greens and fastening your seatbelt. Incidentally, no car journey is complete without a game of I-Spy or Animal, Vegetable or Mineral, with a prize for the child who accumulates the most points.
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