Slaves to Schedule? - by Dea Birkett

Routine, routine, routine. When you first have a baby, that’s all the advice everyone gives you. You must get them into a routine.

Discussions around routine have been big in the news recently. Childrearing guru Gina Ford, who recommends parenting works best when we strictly observe the clock, is at loggerheads with, among others, a new father named Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Clegg has spoken out against the strictures of the author of The Contented Little Baby Book, saying instinct is as good as instruction.

I agree. As a family that travels much of the time, we have to throw routine to the European, African or Asian wind. It’s wonderful. And it definitely doesn’t damage the kids. In fact, it does the opposite. Without a routine imposed from above, kids develop their own rhythms. This sets them up far better for life than any timetables and ridiculous rules they are forced to adopt but don’t understand.

My lack of any regularity began with my first born, who first went abroad at ten days. Slipping between time zones, I had no idea whether she’d had her afternoon nap. I barely knew when afternoon was, and she certainly didn’t. It worked out so much better for all of us. She could sleep when she was tired – a rather simple idea that seems to have escaped Gina Ford. And we weren’t in fear of missing the Prada in Madrid because the Sunday opening hours would coincide with the time she was supposed to sleep.

Yet many friends of mine with small children plan their holidays around the ridiculous mantra of routine. They have to leave to drive to Cornwall at the strangest of hours, to keep in with their toddler’s ‘sleep routine’. They have to take a short haul flight in the late afternoon to make sure their four year old doesn’t miss his ‘daily afternoon snack’. Then, once they arrive, the joys, surprises and unexpectedness of a new place are all squashed by trying to squeeze their kids’ routine into a very differently shaped day, with different hours of light and darkness, different customary mealtimes, different bedtimes expected of children to those at home. But their kids have been so regimentally brought up, they find it impossible to adapt. They still have to have their biggest meal at supper in Spain, even though everyone else has a giant lunch. And though petit Jean and Francoise seem to stay up later than their British counterparts, my British friends still tuck up their kids early when they’re in Paris. Then they moan that they’re imprisoned in their hotel room for the night, when they could be enjoying an evening out with their children.

So don’t drill a routine into your kids. Take them travelling instead, and let them feel the different rhythms of the world. We can’t be slave to schedules.

Now, is it bedtime yet?

Our Love of the Wet Weekend - by Dea Birkett

The instinct when it’s cold and wet outside is to stay inside, to hunker down. That’s the image of the Happy Family, sitting closely together around the flickering fire.

But very few of us have fires anymore, and huddling around the radiator somehow doesn’t have the same ring. So when it’s wet and windy, we don’t stay in, we go out. And we usually go to the wettest, windiest place we can find, which is usually the British seaside.

Last weekend it was Brighton. In the summer, the pier is most unpleasant. You can’t move for bags of hot doughnuts attached to human arms, walking along the creaking planks. But it winter, there’s no queue for this sugary treat. There’s no queue for the Hook a Duck. And a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup in the cutting wind tastes like the best drink you could ever have. My twins are big tea drinkers – have been since they were tiny. I think it’s part of the whole seaside experience.

We ate at Regency Restaurant and stayed at the Hilton Metropole (www.hilton.co.uk) for the sea view. The water’s never blue this time of year, just a solid wall of silver. But we could still spot surfers, immune to the weather like we wanted to be.

At the risk of sounding like Grumpy Old Woman when I’m still in respectable mid-youth with young children, I think we’ve all become a bit wimpish about breaks. In the winter, weekend break has come to mean Madrid, not Margate. But there’s nothing wrong with the South Coast on a cold day. In fact, we prefer it.

See related article: A Rainy Seaside Family Break to Brighton

Travels with Family Films - by Dea Birkett

It hasn’t been Christmas cards but holiday brochures that have been dropping through my front door by the dozen this week. I confess to plopping every one straight into the recycling. Does anyone really read these huge tomes of tiny pictures and complicated graphs of how to calculate the cost of your fortnight in the sun? I don’t. My kids certainly don’t. And, increasingly, they’re having a louder and louder say in where we go away.

Their influences aren’t glossy brochures but TV, books and, in particular, films. We’ve just seen Disney’s latest slick offering – The Princess and the Frog. The film was fine, but the setting was fab. All the love action happens in New Orleans, with very wicked Voodoo-practicing shamans and flighty Southern belles. Now the eight-year-old twins just want to pack their bags and head for Bourbon Street, hoping to meet a member of the Royal Family disguised as a small green amphibian. And I want to go there, too. Not to meet a Princess, but because I still carry the film’s soundtrack of trad jazz in my head, warming me up along the cold streets.

It was the same when we saw Pixar’s Up!. We all wanted to jump on a long haul flight to Venezuela, and search out Angel Falls that the film so dramatically featured. I hope this film-led holiday choice doesn’t apply to everything we see. On Boxing Day, we’re off to watch Where the Wild Things Are. I wonder where that will take us.