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Dad may have had 11 children… but he doesn’t have any parenting tips | Séamas O’Reilly
My father knows that worrying is often useless – and leaves the advice-peddling to everyone else
Asking my friends for parenting advice is tough, because we all know next to nothing, but good because we do at least agree what we’re doing is very hard and we should be proud of ourselves. My dad, by contrast, is the exact opposite. He doesn’t really dispense parenting advice, even though he had 11 children and fostered half a dozen more. He’s basically the end-level boss of dads, the one you have to fight once you’ve dispatched Tom Hanks, Richard Madeley and Liam Neeson’s character from Taken. There’s nothing I’ve done as much, or for as long, as he’s done parenting, but when I ask him specific questions, he always seems slightly bemused I’m having any trouble at all, as if I’ve rung him up for a refresher course on tying my shoelaces.
‘Just do what you think is best,’ he said on the phone a few days ago, when I related my trepidation around introducing the imminent baby to our son. He uttered this with the sort of breezy dismissal that suggested he’d feel more panicked sliding some keys off one fob and on to a different fob. Maybe deep investment in the small anxieties of fatherhood is just one of the first casualties of having so many children. What can trepidation really mean to someone who’s sat through more than 100 school plays? What could perturb a man who has been witness to the gory loss of 220 baby teeth – and had to shell out cold, hard cash for each? My fears about welcoming another child into our family fell on deaf ears, not because my dad is unfeeling, but because he has introduced a new baby to an older sibling no less than 55 times, and can’t remember it ever being much of a problem.
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