Sarah Evans: Seven ages of parenthood

Feb 19 2010 By Sarah Evans

I’m really enjoying A-levels. I couldn’t wait for half term to embark on the wider reading so much extolled by teachers everywhere.

I am reading Eric Hobsbawm The Age of Capital – a 1970s Andrew Marr with Marxist academic spin, more Scott Fitzgerald novels – so escapist and deliciously adolescent, and Freakonomic.

I found GCSEs rather trying. There were highlights but on the whole conversation at home was initiated by me, ‘Have you done your chemistry homework?’ rather than what has happened since we embarked on A-levels where my son interrogates us over supper as to how sound we are on St Thomas Aquinas. There is something about the ability to choose, combined with the genuinely challenging subject matter that seems to have lit a flame of intellectual excitement hitherto smouldering unpromisingly in our family.

Parents’ engagement with their children’s intellectual development varies hugely. I have yet to meet any parent either professionally or personally who has related equally positively to every stage of their child’s education.

When my son was small, I was riddled with guilt when I heard other parents speak of the hours they spent with their toddlers doing finger painting or making collages out of pasta. Then I was struck dumb with admiration at those parents who were excited by 11+ non-verbal reasoning practice papers – but I noticed the 11+ aficionados were rarely also the finger painting brigade.

Then there was the group who made no pretence at helping with the biology homework, sticking on the glittery stars or spotting the next triangle in the sequence, but supported every sports match regardless of weather. While loving children, one hopes, is a constant, being gripped by their age-related interests is not.

Once children are off to university, the immediacy of their day to day intellectual adventure can no longer be a part of family life, but with A-levels the ideas that have grown rusty for many adults, suddenly appear newly burnished, reminding parents of a world beyond the brief weekly flick through a newspaper, and a desperate skim through the pages of Nigella Express.

And the best bit is, you don’t have to take the exams.

* Sarah Evans, Principal, King Edward VI High School for Girls