Joanne the Coach

My Great Panto Review

Last week I went to see Peter Pan at Brighton's Theatre Royal, as part of The Great Panto Review, a nationwide online overview of the UK's top Christmas shows. Here's my review. The reviews are also part of a campaign to raise money for children with cancer. More info and how to donate here - Come on, don't be a scrooge, it's for sick nippers, so be kind in 2009 and bung 'em a few quid.

The Mummy Bloggers, the PRs and Working for Chips

One of the regular features I write for ParentDish is a roundup of the week's best parent blog posts. It's been a fascinating introduction to that whole world. Lately, there's been a row grumbling along concerning the way PRs have been circling the mummy blogs, looking for fresh meat.

In a nutshell, what's been happening is that the UK parent blogging scene has expanded enormously over the last year. More blogs, more readers, more word of mouth buzz. And now, more approaches from PRs, who've been sending press releases, offering products for review or incentives to blog about their products. Some mummy bloggers even got a free trip to Disneyland (being further down the blogchain, I got a trip to Butlins instead).

But for every clever PR bunny, there are many with hearts of cloth and brains of fluff. So you'll get nappies and baby food offered to reviewers whose youngest is six, and 'flavoured lubes' offered to someone who is innocent as they day is long (Me). When I get inappropriate press releases, I delete them. But Mummy Bloggers take a much more visible approach. Attempt to reel in a blogger in a patronising manner and they might well react like this.

The impression being given is that some PRs really do think that mummy bloggers are just silly little housewives, grateful for attention and ready to fall for any old flannel. They aren't, you know. When you send an email saying "love your blog", it's perfectly obvious when you haven't read it.

This latest PR request, I think, sets a new low (though I suspect there's deeper to fall). A manufacturer of potato products is running a campaign to educate kids about food (mainly potatoes). They are offering the first 15 bloggers to write about this campaign a whole - count 'em - £20 in vouchers for their potato products.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it - is blogging for chips.

Reminds me of the time I was walking down Oxford Street with my daughter, and we happened upon some male models clad only in pants. Daughter wondered why they were doing this, and I explained that it was their job, and they probably raked in a lot of money for shivering in their undercrackers on London's busiest street. With her best nine year old wisdom, she replied "Yes, but how much for their dignity?".

I think PRs need to wind their necks in a bit and be aware that all this gushing forth towards the mummy bloggers may well come back and bite them on the bum. And mummy bloggers need to be very careful about what they agree to do. Don't blog for chips, you're better than that.

Parents! Dump Your Stuff on Me

You will be relieved to learn that I have a new job to keep me out of mischief. The great thing about it is that it combines two of my favourite things - writing and coaching. If only they could find a way to shoehorn chocolate into the equation then I really would be in hog heaven.

I'll be writing features and an Agony Aunt-style column for a new parenting website called Parent Dish. Here are some of the posts I've written already:

• Dealing with competitive kids
• Help! My seven year old's a teenager

• Parents - Ditch the guilt

• Beating family morning mania

I will be (please please pretty please) requiring your help to produce the column - every Aunt needs her Agony, and I'm after yours. 

So if you are a parent of a child of any age up to around 13 and have a question/dilemma you'd like answered by an experienced life coach, send it to me at this address. Your question and answer can be anonymous/name changed if you prefer.
 
Please pass this message on to any parents you think might be interested.

And thanks again for your help. I would offer you my first born by way of thanks, but then I would have nothing to write about.

Family Friendly Freelancing

There's some practical advice here from meself and Antonia Chitty on how to combine freelancing with bringing up a family. 

Thanks to Linda Jones for writing this and cleaning up all my swearing.  Oops.  Sorry about that.  A prize of a jar of pickled eggs if you can spot the quote that originally housed profanities.

Babies in the Boozer - part 364 gazillion

The rights and wrongs of taking your younglings to the pub seems to be one subject that will not go away.  (See here and especially here for previous posts on this topic) 

Here's my article from today's Daily Express on why I fink it's A Good Fing.

Baby Lager Lout's Revenge

Remember when I posted about children's behaviour in pubs, the issue that divides the women from the ill-mannered louts?

Well, the topic is back in the news and is creating controversy over on The Guardian's blog.  Check out the reaction to this post by Will Beckett about baby lager louts. I posted a comment which mentioned the fact that I've been taking my children to the pub since they were very young (one week old to be precise).  In exchange for sharing this charming vignette of life chez Joanne, I've been called a lazy parent, selfish and generally responsible for all of the world's woes.  Sorry about that.

If, by any chance, you disagree that taking your child to the pub is an affront to decent society, join me in the First Official Take Your Child To The Pub Weekend. 

Like all my wheezes, the rules are simple:

Pub Rules for Children

• Take ‘em young, so they get used to how to behave in public spaces.
• Arrive and leave early.  No child is cute at 9pm in a pub.  Even 8pm is pushing it, so make sure you have skedaddled by then.  Your child is unlikely to want to stay out for as long as you do, so look on any visit over an hour as a bonus.
• If Junior kicks off, remove him.  Don’t try and deal with it in situ.  Noise always carries more than you think.
• No running around. The pub is like the swimming pool, in that walking, not running, is the order of the day.
• Come prepared with toys and other distractions.  Some pubs provide colouring books, but don’t rely on it.
• Suitable pub games include:  sketching the bar staff; reading; Lego; any electronic gizmo.
• Unsuitable pub games include:  Hide and Seek; Tag; Football

So, will you be joining us in celebrating FOTYCTTPW?

 

Children in Pubs (Preferably Seen But Not Heard)

I am writing a feature about how to get your kids to behave well when you take them to the pub.  Yesterday I did a shout out amongst my various email groups for tips.  The response has been surprising, because it turns out that this is a much more controversial (and gender divided) issue than it first seemed to be.

The women who offered tips were universally saying:  "Bring a colouring book, order a large one, drink it swift."

However, the men had a different outlook.  They were incandescent that one should even think of darkening the door of one's local hostelry with younglings in tow.  Apparently pubs should remain as adult-only spaces.  Having made the decision to have children, we should accept that our pub-going has been curtailed and stick to familyesque outlets for some considerable time.

What rot.  As George Orwell said, when he described the perfect pub in his essay, The Moon Under Water:

"I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children —and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be."

What do you think?

Parenting Bingo

Am thinking I deserve some kind of prize for showing the kids up in public not once, but twice in three days - first by bemoaning their lack of Crazy Bones in The Guardian, and tonight by talking on Veggie Radio about their vegetarian-ness. 

Next step:  bad dancing at the school disco.  That's gotta be worth a few points too.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

I like to think of myself as a fairly liberal parent, but even I know that this is wrong on so many levels.

This is kind of off too. Though the reviews have a lot of class.

Happy Guilt-Free Mothers Day

Look what I found between the sofa cushions - an extra day.  Where did that come from?

Did you see Sandra Parsons' column in The Times yesterday?  She's certainly spot on to note that the more Middle England the child, the more they view a trip to McDonald's as an immeasurable treat.

However, one sentence made me pull the face.

One of the things you learn in personal development, is that if a client talks about 'you' doing or feeling something, what they really mean is 'I'.  So if someone says "You know when you do X and you feel a bit Y", they are really talking about their own feelings.  But it helps to mentally distance these things, because then you can blame it on somebody else and avoid taking responsibility for your own feelings.

So when Sandra Parsons writes about working mothers:  "You feel feel permanent guilt at not being a good enough mother", although it reads like an attempt to tar the lot of us with the same brush, it's really the writer's own feelings about her own life coming through. 

Regular readers will know that this blog is a parental guilt-free zone.  My children were not born with a free package of guilt, and I resist any attempts to palm one off on me. I don't feel guilty about any aspect of working and parenting.  I'm doing the best I can.  When I go wrong I aim to do better.  Why feel guilty about that?

The part I do think Parsons gets right is about our lives being out of control.  But then that's true for anybody, whether you're a parent or not.  Absolutely nobody is in 100% control of their life.  This is why perfectionism rarely works - life, with its regular curveballs, will always change your plans.

It doesn't do working mothers any favours at all to promote the myth that we must all feel guilty that we're somehow not good enough.  And sometimes it feels positively radical to say that you (of course I mean I) will have no part in keeping the guilty myth going.  Even with an extra day, life's too short for that.