When he was a teenager he would hide his smoking and drinking from his parents. Now as a parent, he's hiding them from his child
Sometimes after a stressful day at work I like to unwind with a beer and (yes, I know its bad for you) a cigarette. Before I can do this though, I have to go to the end of my garden and crouch down behind some bins so that I can't be seen from the house. As an added precaution, I take some Extra sugar-free gum and some air-freshener with me. Every so often, I check to make sure that I haven't been spotted. No, I am not a teenager – I am a 34-year-old father of one.
The 'one' is the reason why I am doing this. I am hiding from my nine-year-old daughter. It's not that I don't want her to see me doing something bad. It's because I want to avoid the 30-minute lecture from her about the danger of cigarettes and alcohol.
At some point between the age of six and nine my sweet and kind daughter became a health Nazi. Like many children, she likes her rules, and approaches them with an attitude of zero tolerance. If I lived in a repressive regime she would be the first to turn me in (as she did to my mother who is totally anti-everything). She is not alone in this – I have noticed that all my friends' children are the same.
Apparently I have too much sugar in tea, listen to my iPod too loudly and slouch. I blame schools.
The other day I was sitting in the beer garden of a pub with a friend and our two children. I bummed a cigarette off of her and as we lit up our kids started singing a song about how smoking turns your lungs black. It really put me, my friend, and everyone else in the pub, off and I had to go around apologising when we were about to leave.
Personally, I blame the schools. Every day I seem to be on the receiving end of a health-related lecture about something that I am doing wrong.
Besides smoking, I apparently have too much sugar in my tea, eat too many chips, listen to my iPod too loudly, slouch when I sit, don't eat enough fruit and veg, and if I have more than two drinks in an evening I'm turning into an alcoholic.
I am glad that my daughter is concerned about my health, but I am not exactly a high health risk. I exercise regularly, I eat right, and I am at the centre of my healthy BMI. The fact of the matter is, my daughter's concern lacks perspective. Every time she spots me doing something I shouldn't she bursts into tears and tells me that I am going to die, and refuses to speak to me for the rest of the day. She once told a group of my friends that I wasn't her daddy any more after she spotted me smoking. I didn't mention that her constant nagging was the cause of me drinking and smoking in the first place.
I do wonder sometimes though about the limit of parental behaviour. After all, alcohol is dangerous substance (my father-in-law is a recovering alcoholic) and parents teach from example. Should I be drinking in front of my daughter at all? Or am I showing her responsible drinking (I'm not exactly a party-animal). My parents never drank in front of me. My mother never liked drinking alcohol, and my dad, who liked the odd beer, didn't really keep any around the house. It neither made me more or less curious about alcohol as a teenager. Like the rest of my friends at the time I went out drinking and pretending that I liked it, and quickly learnt what my tolerance was (not much) and enthusiastically exceeded it (as all teenagers do).
'Why do you drink?' daughter asked me one morning after a particularly large night out. 'You'll understand when you're older,' I croaked back.
