It is often said, and truly, that you can’t choose your family. But the lack of choice in a parent’s life goes much further than this. Once you have children forming their own extra-familial relationships, you enter into a community of people that you can’t avoid. Only you don’t have the blood bonds that somehow keep family together (if you’re lucky). Inevitably, you are not going to like all of that imposed community. The chances are, you could cheerfully throttle some of them.
With annoying or dislikable kids some recourse is available when they are in your home and in your power – ideally using tactics that they won’t be able to plausibly squeal about to their parents. You could try subtly undermining their self-esteem (“Do you really feel you need to have that pudding, dear? It’s very calorific”) or being wilfully unfair, perhaps by making sure that their choice of DVD never prevails (“Frozen is scratched I’m afraid … but this classic black and white documentary on the native wildlife of East Anglia is box fresh”).
Such shameful – but entirely understandable – malice is particularly tempting when experiencing that modern horror, the sleepover. Here, you find out the true cost of hospitality when, at 1am, little Scheherazade or Cordelia is still cackling at the top of her voice while spreading the remnants of an illicit and adhesive midnight feast across the bedclothes and keeping your own children from sleeping so they will be thoroughly ill-tempered all through the next day.
As payback, try a little casual cruelty when they show you their half-witted drawing of a pony, loudly admiring it before listlessly chucking it in the bin, or pointedly offering the dog one of the cookies they just made and pressed on you with their own dear little hands (ideally, you will have trained the dog to refuse it).
The parents can present a bigger problem. Let’s assume, for instance, that the parents of little Crispin are card-carrying fascists. Very few people are quite so theatrically evil nowadays, so just say they swear by the Daily Express and have a signed photo of Nigel Farage on their mantelpiece.
You have to sit around at their houses, perhaps when coming to pick up the children, while they make lots of veiled yet surly references to hijabs and “so-called refugees”. Or the problem may not be the tiresome opinions of the parents. It may be their behaviour that is problematic. A family with an admirable belief system may nevertheless smoke relentlessly inside the house or let the kids have access to age-inappropriate viewing material, or have pets with fleas that your children pick up and distribute.
Grin and bear it is the obvious solution, at least when it comes the adults. Suck your way through cups of ill-brewed tea and leave after a quick biscuit or accepting the invitation for a glass of something stronger. Pretend you have an eating disorder when invited over for dinner. Otherwise, the best solution is just to leave it alone and complain behind their backs. Hypocrisy has served the British well for centuries and it has a lot to commend it. Any attempt to curtail the behaviour of the parents is liable to be seen as snooty and high-minded and is bound to fail.
The children are another matter. You’ll almost certainly get away with it. That’s the beauty of the whole thing. Because all parents know their children are so lovable no one could ever wish them ill. That’s certainly the case with mine, who I know are beyond all possibility of being covertly persecuted by my parental peers. Or that’s what I tell them, anyway.
