THE WORLD FEELS a bit wobbly right now. It’s strung out, overtired and about to throw an epic tantrum because we won’t stop spaffing carbon, starting wars and electing bell ends. What sort of idiot brings children into a world when humans are having their Malthusian moment? Me: a fecklessly fecund idiot. Parenting in the present climate (emergency) isn’t great for my sanity.  

Please don’t dismiss me as another anxious millennial. Of course I’m bloody anxious – have you seen the state of Western democracy? The geopolitical polycrisis/omnishambles/clusterfuck is extra terrifying when you have the skin of your offspring in the game. 

Point of information: I am a middle-class white woman; my bubble of privilege should make me immune to such nonsense. But Trump is now back in the White House and Craig David is back in the charts. Life resembles that First Aid Kit song where I’m not sure if they’re singing ‘feudal’ or ‘futile’ – perhaps it’s both.  

How does one balance raising children with a sense of wonder and innocence in a world that’s just waiting for them to get hot/legal/sign up to the heterodoxy? As their mother I reserve the right to irrevocably damage them. It’s my job to give them some good therapy fodder in case future them have any money to spare after buying future air and water. It’s not the world’s job to screw them up. 

AS THE PROUD owner of three under-fives at the beginning of Covid, I could be forgiven for thinking I’ve had my fair share of ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ events to contend with. I’m reminded of the fifth season of House of Cards, when people complained that things had become too outlandish. Then the man who insisted upon a cameo in Home Alone 2 so the production company could film in his daddy’s hotel became the actual president and satire, basically, stopped being fun.  

At risk of piling on or, in the words of Jonathan Pie, having a full-blown liberal meltdown, it would be disingenuous of me to pretend the return of the Tangerine Toddler and his sidekick hadn’t triggered this piece. Updating the old toupee gag, I have always felt it imprudent to trust a man with a hair transplant – he’s lying to himself and he’s probably lying to you too. The same goes for fake tan and out-of-court settlements. Trump was the chewing gum stuck to the underside of the global desk: it was vile and you knew it was there, but you didn’t have to look at it. Yet on 5 November 2024, America reached under that desk, peeled off the glob and started chowing down. In entirely foreseeable fashion, Trump is now serving as the fascists’ fluffer (the alt and far rights’ semi in Europe has progressed to full-blown wood), and American women can’t even get their abortions did to let off steam. Margaret Atwood is supposed to be a fiction writer, not bloody Nostradamus.  

While America is having a rather spectacular ‘all behaviour is communication’ moment, the rest of the world is on fire too (much of it literally): there’s the supposed peace in Gaza, Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, the fact that it’s presently illegal for women to speak outside of the home in Afghanistan.  

I’m perilously close to a Murdoch publication headline, but this is absolutely outrageous. 

So the planet is broken and politics has gone properly batshit – of course I’m having a liberal meltdown! No wonder global birth rates are plummeting (pro-lifers: this does not legitimise your desire to control half the nation’s nethers). The good old days were when children served belters such as ‘Mummy, why is your bottom so hairy?’ (referring to my pubes, but the woman in the next cubicle wasn’t to know that). Now my crotch-goblins look up at me and ask: ‘Mummy, why did Badamir [pun: child’s own] Putin think it was okay to hurt Ukraine?’ And ‘Will the twice-elected President of the United States really be able to grab my genitals with impunity?’ It’s hard to break the news that actually it’s not just impunity – the bronzed groper also has immunity from almost all of the law. Why I haven’t been able to sell my children’s book, I’ll never know.  

GROWING UP IN the 1980s, the worst we had to contend with were paedophiles, passive smoking and adults who were sceptical about seatbelt use. Perfectly navigable without losing your damn mind. My generation of parents can’t even self-soothe with mother’s ruin because any amount of alcohol is bad for you. How did we go from baby farms where the kids were plied with laudanum to me worrying about my child’s daily magnesium intake and whether their ability to use fronted adverbials will impact their life chances? Unfairly, millennial parents get a lot of flak for being snowflake/helicopter/over-anxious child-rearers, but you can’t blame us – did I mention fronted adverbials? 

And what about social media, eh? Knowing that shit will rot your teeth and your mind, we’re finally legislating against kids having access to it – or shutting the gate after they’ve already spent their childhoods working on their personal brands. Australia is leading the way with its under-sixteens social media ban, despite being a little (tactical mumbling) sketchy on the delivery. This is super helpful (the ban, not the vagueness of the implementation) because now parents face the thrilling choice of letting their kids have profiles and be damaged…or not letting them have profiles and be socially ostracised. I can’t be alone in missing the days when having ‘followers’ meant you were the leader of some dodgy cult – the very opposite of aspirational.  

And don’t forget to angst over the extreme content children stumble upon these days instead of building dens and taking sweets from strangers. God knows what they’re consuming on their iPads so that you can distract them while you get (a low-salt, nutritionally balanced) dinner on the table. Although perhaps we need to worry less about this supposed correlation to future deviancy – I’m confident Dominique Pelicot didn’t have an iPad as a lad, and yet here we are.  

Even vegetables have become unreliable. Thanks to modern farming practices, the veggies your kids refuse to eat aren’t as nutrient-dense as they used to be – meaning your ‘I hate all green food’ children should be consuming even more of the (not-so) good stuff. Ultra-processed foods also take up a good deal of my stygian worry hours – time when I should be sleeping but instead lie awake and feel bad about my kids’ future prospects. My mum gave me SunnyD as a kid, and I still adore her. If I serve a dinner that scores less than ten out of ten, I risk my kids going non-contact with me.  

Of course, when we politely say ‘parenting’, it’s a euphemism for mothering. Much has been written, empirically studied and bitched about to girlfriends about the grinding reality of being the she-fault parent in heterosexual relationships. We’re meant to either smile about it or put in the work to address domestic inequality. I mean, seriously? Because our to-do list wasn’t long enough? Subsequently (note my fronted adverbial), most of this parenting anxiety falls on mums’ shoulders, with the added iconoclastic expectation that we have our meltdown while avoiding toxic positivity and modelling healthy coping mechanisms. What happened to sundowners and mother’s packet of Camels? We all know mindfulness isn’t going to cut it here.  

So yes, I’m angry and mildly hysterical, but it’s a rational response to a world that’s losing the plot: in short, everything’s shit on both a macro and micro level.  

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to hide vegetables in some beige carbs and play ‘is that a scratch or the start of a flesh-eating Buruli ulcer?’ 

Image by Larissa Deruzzi from Pexels courtesy of Canva