If you’re a parent, the figure will probably sound a little light to you: according to a survey, the average child inflicts £3,466 worth of damage on the average home in the course of an upbringing.
To be honest, as the father of three boys, I only really remember the expensive highlights – two destroyed tellies, a kitchen light ripped from its fitting, the smashed bathroom sink – the prison riot stuff. If you add in all the broken glass, indoor football damage and machine-washed phones, I’m sure the total would reach four figures.
Coincidentally, another survey reveals that parents plunder an average of £46.20 from their children’s piggy banks and money boxes every year, in search of parking change, school lunch money and domestic petty cash. I’m not saying I’ve never done this – I’ve cracked a few toy safes in my time – but I’m not sure I could ever raise that much in the short space of a year. Even if I could, this level of larceny amounts to about £830 a child over 18 years, which is way off the break-even point. I’m not suggesting child-rearing is an enterprise that ought to wash its face, but we need to be realistic about the losses incurred. I’m not even factoring in all the coins that went missing from my pockets whenever I left my trousers unattended. That’s another story.
According to the first survey, most of this child-centred damage is to walls, woodwork, carpets, pictures, beds and sofas. This might explain why the figure is relatively low; most of the required repairs are of the kind you just stop doing when you have kids. By the same logic that makes professional ice hockey players reluctant to spend money on dental work until they’ve retired, it doesn’t really make sense to rewallpaper a child’s bedroom until you’re in a position to turn it into a home office.
It’s amazing what sort of damage you can teach yourself to view as merely cosmetic. One becomes adept at opening drawers that no longer have handles, positioning cushions over stains, placing towels where curtains once hung. My children quickly learned to cope with a bathroom sink with a big hole in it; it stayed that way for a year, until the crack spread and the whole thing fell off the wall.
Somewhere in this obligatory parsimony there may even be a lesson: if you break it, it stays broken. You will have to live with the consequences of your childish heedlessness. Unless you break the TV. If you break the TV, your father will have a new one in its place within 24 hours.
