The kids were in the back of the car discussing rail strikes. The 15-year-old thinks strikes would be more effective if they were a surprise: when they are announced in advance, people just plan around them and it deadens the impact. It would be much more chaotic if they were decided on the spur of the moment, and left us all stranded on trains. The 13-year-old thinks, conversely, that strikes should be banned because they are annoying.
What’s my move, here, I wonder. Do I introduce them to the concept of the wildcat strike, followed by a whistle-stop tour of the coolest wildcat strikes in UK history? Do I threaten to disinherit my little Tory? Maybe just a casual introduction to the proud history of the trade union movement, and the importance of power equipoise between capital and labour?
Nope – say nothing. Say nothing, ever. They are doing it to wind me up; they probably planned it in advance. It is the great fallacy of parenting that you can instil wokery in your children. Progressive values, feminism, the concept of inalienable human rights: people talk about all these things if it were possible to just insert them, like broccoli, like piano lessons. It works really well for a bit: when he was six, the 15-year-old came up with a fantastic rationale for why food and housing should be free. Job done, I thought. Job done magnificently.
I had reckoned without the phase where all they want to do is yank my chain, and now they are like foxes in a hen house, casually slaying all my opinions just to watch them die. I have made a terrible error. I should have gone with “There are two sides to every argument” and left them to guess which side I was on. As it is, they know every single thing I think, from “the ‘just war’ is fine as a concept but very rarely observable in real life” to “motorbikes are dangerous”, and nothing delights them more than staging a chat – ideally one I can hear but am not in – about whether it would be cooler to join the army or the navy, and whether to get a moped licence first or go straight to the Hells Angels.
It’s like living with a young Jordan Peterson and a mini Ayn Rand. Obviously, the best thing is not to react, and I can manage that for about 45 seconds. Sure, OK, the England men’s team would probably beat the England women’s team at football, even though the women’s team are objectively more successful. OK, if you say so, the men’s under-16s could beat the women’s team. No, 11 men selected at random would not beat the England women’s team. Surely they know why women’s football was banned in the first place? It was because WE WERE TOO GOOD. As soon as I start speaking in capital letters, telling them things they already know from BBC Bitesize, their victory is complete, although sometimes they like to really bring it home by moving on to the invisible hand of the free market.
I miss the phase before this one, where they used to try to outflank me to the left: when I couldn’t use chopsticks because of cultural appropriation and I wasn’t allowed to do a French accent because it was racist, even though on the occasion in question I was literally trying to speak French to a French person. Admittedly, in one way I don’t miss it because it was a nightmare, but I miss that innocent time when I thought PCer-than-thou was as bad as it got. Now they are full of this demonic mischief, and even though I know as surely as I know anything that nobody in this house thinks the Doctor in Doctor Who is innately male, I cannot not rise to it.
So, of course, I eventually crack and start introducing the proud history of the trade union movement, and of course I say it in capital letters, and of course they already know about it from BBC Bitesize.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
