‘You don’t want us to grow up,’ a teen said to me. He was absolutely right

Hello. I am the worst mum in the world. The strictest, the most unreasonable, the most overprotective, and the only one, yes the only one, out of all of my teenagers’ friends’ parents, who won’t allow them to take their phones to bed with them, at night-time.

On account of me being unreasonable and overprotective, you see.

I am also, according to the home-made Mother’s Day cards that I was proudly presented with last week, the best mum in the world, with a penchant for digestive biscuits, chocolate, and Virgil van Dijk.

As any parent knows, these things can both be true at the same time, and are dependent, at any given time, on who in the family you ask. Though my natural humility leads me to balk at the second suggestion, who am I to question the wisdom that comes from the mouths of babes? Unless, of course, they’re pleading their case to be allowed stay up and watch yet another episode of The Simpsons when I’m already Flandered out and it’s well past their bedtime. A fall from grace and the coveted position of best mum in the world may be on the cards due to my insistence, but I’m okily dokily with that.

Misadventures in babysitting: ‘We trusted her. Here she was drinking and dancing as our son cried’

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Twelve points to consider if your child seems to be academically or socially out of step

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I am that deeply suspect Irish creature, a mother of an only child. It was by choice

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‘Again, my pesky children failed to tell tales on their friends to their parents’

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My children draw great comparisons between their various sibling experiences of being reared by me. Tales of some not being allowed stroll past the house at the top of our road, lest they leave my line of vision, versus younger siblings practically abandoned in the wilds of the sittingroom, having to fend for themselves and sometimes even served sandwiches with the crusts still on, are commonplace.

I, of course, like any reasonable parent, simply explain the rules have changed because when you know better, you do better. The truth is, it’s like trying to hold back the tide as they get older. Those great plans and higher standards you had when your older kids were younger, slip as you try to navigate a world of hormones, freedoms and online challenges on top of everything else that life throws at you.

As well as the tide, you’re trying to push back against time. “You don’t want us to grow up,” a teen once said to me as we disputed the time he had to be home by. He was absolutely right, though I, of course, didn’t admit it – I still stand by the curfew, mind.

The reality is my younger children are being parented by very different parents. Wiser in some ways, quite likely. Defeated in others, most definitely. I have raised some teenagers and lived to tell the tale. Parenting is trial and error, more times than we’d like to admit and so that, along with general exhaustion, tends to dictate the change we see between how we parent our first children and subsequent ones.

For any parents raising multiple children at the same time, you realise quickly that you’re not the only influence on the younger children in your home. There are older, far cooler siblings to keep up with, which can mean rushing through childhood phases or bypassing them altogether, in an attempt to catch up.

So she, who definitely struggles with her children growing up, decided to go retro in recent weeks in a desperate bid to up the standards because, though my older children might beg to differ, I actually got some things right in my rookie parenting days.

[ ‘If I hadn’t a pal to distract me from the monotony of running, then Albert Square was going to have to do’ ]

I considered how I used to pop all of them into the bath at the one time, for speed when they were younger, and thought the teens might not be particularly keen on that one. So, I decided instead to reintroduce bedtime stories for the younger ones.

As the arguments for an extra episode of The Simpsons subsided, I was reminded that this was one of the nicest things to do as a parent. But because this is real life, and not a fairy-tale, I should flag that the trade-off has been working later, juggling sports runs and an increased general chaos in other areas of the night-time drill.

But then one child clambers on top of you excitedly exclaiming “I knew that was going to happen”, as the story plot unfolds and all is forgotten in those few minutes. That is until you catch a glimpse of one younger sibling smiling and see the likeness between him and an older brother or sister who is now grown up or on the cusp of adulthood. And you remember being told when you first started out that it passes by in the blink of eye.

But you’ve lived it, so you know it’s really true, no matter what way you parent now.