I’m going away next week with my kids. What holidays are the fashionable children taking this year? Diane, by email
I’ve been thinking a lot about kids on holiday because I have spent a lot of time recently looking at photos of celebrities’ children on holidays. Has it always been thus? I’m not so sure that it has. I don’t remember seeing photos of, say, Kenny G’s kids on holiday in the 90s, and yet I could now give you a detailed breakdown of John Legend’s kids’ holiday wardrobes. (Is it wrong to compare Legend to Kenny G? But they both make wedding dance music and have daft surnames! Fine, I admit it, I don’t get the appeal of Legend’s music – not, of course, that this has stopped me from devoting thousands of hours of my life to his Instagram feed, and that of his wife.)
It is gross to look at photos of kids and judge them, but I’m not doing that, I swear (I’m judging the parents). The real joy of looking at photos of celebrities’ kids is seeing the disjunct between the image and the text. It is, of course, obligatory for celebrities to say that they are giving their children a normal upbringing, how their kids definitely don’t have lives like something out of a 90s hip-hop music video – no, not at all, they’re totally normal! And such quotes are invariably accompanied by a photo of said six-year-old standing in a swimming pool on a yacht sipping an elaborate fruit drink. That’s Blue Ivy Carter, folks, and she’s out there living large for all of us.
Gwyneth Paltrow, a favourite of this column, is always a good one for this, talking at length about how her kids have totally normal lives, usually right after they’ve been on the main stage at Glastonbury to sing with their dad, Chris Martin. Which is sweet, no question, but, let’s be honest, not exactly normal. But la Paltrow possibly has a skewed perception of “normal”, given she once insisted that parents with “an office job” have fewer challenges than she does as a millionaire movie actor, because their lives are more “routine”. Thank you, Gwyneth. Never stop being you.
A classic example of this genre appeared this week when Elton John and David Furnish and their two boys were photographed by the paparazzi holidaying on a yacht in the south of France. At least one of the little boys was wearing a shirt from Gucci, John’s new favourite designer label, and there were many sweet pictures of the boys jumping off the boat into the clear sea, watched carefully by John, Furnish and what looked like a battalion of staff.
The tabloids ran these pap shots alongside some pointedly choice quotes from John about how he and Furnish are raising the children, including some from an interview in the Guardian in 2016 in which he talked about how the boys do chores around the house “to learn the value of doing something and earning something for themselves”.
“I came from a very working-class background where I had to work for everything I got and I want to instil those same values in them. But it’s harder growing up in this world and David and I are very mindful of that,” John recently told Hello!.
Now, before we continue, I feel I need to make something clear: I love Elton John. I love his music, I love his grumpy-cat face and I especially love how he can clearly bitch for Britain, and any man who can do that is welcome to take me on his yacht any time he fancies. I also love how much he clearly adores his family, and the photos of him holding his little boys’ hands as they pootle about together in Cannes are probably the cutest things I’ve seen this week that don’t involve my own kids.
But my point is: why do celebrities bother with this nonsense? Of course their children don’t have normal lives – it would be downright weird if they did, given their parents most certainly don’t have normal lives. Are they saying their kids fly back in economy while their parents are in the private jet? The kids are given out-of-date frozen fish fingers while their parents eat organic feasts cooked by the private chef? Do they sleep in a creaky flat in the suburbs while their parents are in a quadruple-fronted gated house in Notting Hill? What kind of monsters are these parents?
I get that (some) celebrities really do care about their kids not being spoiled brats, and I fully believe that John is such a parent. I also get that they themselves don’t want to come across as obnoxious jerks and therefore don’t feel able to say: “Yeah, obviously my kid has been flying in private jets since she was in utero and she wouldn’t recognise Gap Kids if it slapped her in the face with a Gucci sandal.” But we all know it’s true and, frankly, we’d call child protection services if it wasn’t. Enjoy those yachts, kids. We’d worry if you were anywhere else.
