As a mum, I’m grateful to Sean St Ledger for talking so openly about the dark feelings when his football career stalled.
St Ledger, you may remember, scored Ireland’s only goal at Euro 2012, but languished between clubs after leaving Leicester City last summer. He’s now on a short-term contract with Ipswich Town; his future as an international player is murky.
“I’ve found this period really lonely,” St Ledger told RTÉ in November. “I ring my friends and say, ‘What have you been up to?’ and they say ‘I’ve been training, what about you?’ I’ve just gone to the gym or gone to do Bikram Yoga and come home. I don’t really do anything because I’m obviously hoping that tomorrow I’m going to get a phone call. It’s been quite difficult.”
We parents are inclined to be a little more, em, discreet in discussing our own failures with our children, which is why it’s so brilliant when adults in the public eye are so honest.
We do our kids no favours by pretending to be infallible. No, it doesn’t make our sons and daughters feel secure. Quite the opposite, according to mental health experts.
Teenagers, in particular, live in an anxious world and trying to catch up with their supposedly successful parents only adds to their anxiety, according to Dr Harry Barry, a GP in Drogheda, Co Louth, who has a special interest in mental health.
Barry co-wrote a book on parenting teenagers called Flagging the Screenager with therapist Enda Murphy, who gave a riveting parenting course at my kids' secondary school. Murphy told us we were fine at teaching our kids how to succeed, but we also need to teach them how to fail.
Gulp. Teach my children to fail? How? Even the suggestion sounds weird. Here in middle-class land, parenting is all about helping kids shine.
Grades dipping in Irish? Not to worry. A friend of a friend knows a great grind. And I’ve heard of an excellent Gaeltacht that teaches the language through water sports. Meantime, we have a neighbour who’s fluent. How about I make a call and you go over for a weekly chat as gaeilge?
Signposts to talents
Or hobbies. Hobbies are very useful, not as interesting ways to pass the time, but as possible signposts to talents that must be encouraged because, well, just because. Hence the proliferation of classes in art, gymnastics, drama, creative writing, and the willingness of worn-out parents to drive from Dingle to Dublin to Donegal so that Orla can dazzle in an Irish dancing feis.
But “failure”? Failure is the one extra-curricular activity I haven’t signed a child up for.
I’m in good company, it seems. The headmistress of an elite London school recently rued what she called “snowplough parents”, determined to clear all of life’s obstacles from their children’s path. I hear her. I’m the lunatic at the controls, using the snowplough to shove my children implacably through all the bumps and barriers.
According to Barry, I’d be better off showing my children that I, too, fail regularly but stagger on nonetheless. It’s a daunting prospect. One of the gratifying parts of parenting is that, early on, we’re the heroes who can make everything better with a kiss on the knee, followed by a plaster. Switching to chatting about the time I threw up in public at a party is, well, a bit of a comedown.
Hard knocks
The thing is, whether we prepare them or not, failure will find our kids. One day they’ll realise that no one enjoys their singing quite as much as Grandad. Or their parents will split up.
It’s not as though the kids themselves are unaware of this. Children’s literature tackles the topic with gusto.
Author Jacqueline Wilson, for example, writes many of her stories from the point of view of the plain girl whose dad is violent, or the fat kid who by rights should be in care, or the unloved child who actually is in care. My daughter always finishes a Wilson book longing to make friends with the loser narrator rather than the snobby, popular girls who torment her.
Another of my children is obsessively fond of Adrian Mole. Has any hero ever failed more thoroughly, both professionally and emotionally, yet remained more deluded about his talent, than Adrian?
Even Harry Potter, who becomes a leader in a war against evil, begins his career in wizardry as an unloved reject who lives in a cupboard under his aunt and uncle’s stairs. Still, there’s something especially thrilling when real-life heroes fail, yet refuse to become failures.
For retired boxer Kenneth Egan, the moment when the entire world hailed him as a success – when he won a silver medal at the Beijing Olympics – also began two years of hell as he struggled to cope with fame. Now he tells young people that it’s perfectly okay to have negative thoughts. What matters is how you handle them. A message that all parents, even us pushy snowploughs, need to echo.
Breda O’Brien is on leave