Philippa Perry: ‘Most parents are not evil – they’re lovely people with the wrong tools’ | Health, mind and body books
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When Philippa Perry finished, after several years of writing and a lifetime of research, the first draft of her book about improving relationships between parents and children, she sent it to her editor – and their relationship promptly collapsed.
“She felt really told off by the book. She has teenagers and, of course, sometimes she would tell them: ‘Get out of bed, you lazy sods!’ So what I wrote went straight into her heart,” says Perry, who very much does not advocate calling one’s children “lazy sods”. This must have been painful for you to hear, I say. “Actually, it was amazing feedback,” she replies with the good cheer of a psychotherapist who firmly believes painful moments can beget productive solutions. “I realised that my own anger towards my parents had leaked out into the book. So I rewrote it and it’s a better book.” And how do matters stand with her editor? “Relationships are often about rupture and repair, and we have very much repaired.”
The result of all this rupturing and repairing was the ingeniously titled The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did), which became one of this year’s publishing success stories, its distinctive orange and blue cover as omnipresent in a certain type of family home as Ella’s Kitchen organic baby food and Cosmic Kids Yoga.
Out in paperback next week, it is Perry’s third book – after Couch Therapy (2010) and How to Stay Sane (2012) – and her most successful. To date, it has sold more than 240,000 copies and it’s not hard to see why: she writes with a thoughtful, inquisitive elegance rarely found in parenting guides, which tend more to dry didacticism. Despite her revisions, the book is still firm with parents but also forgiving (ruptures can be repaired), full of the currently popular attachment-parenting theories (children’s needs come first) while chucking in some common sense (sometimes parents need a break). Most of all, it is incisive and persuasive – God, it’s persuasive. I’ve yet to meet a parent who hasn’t altered their parenting to some degree after reading it, myself extremely included.
Most parents are lovely people who have been given the wrong tools
Perry’s primary message is that parents need to acknowledge their children’s feelings instead of denying them (“Don’t be silly”) or jazz-handsing them away (“Don’t cry, I’ll get you an ice-cream”). We do that, she writes, because that’s how we were brought up and we copy what our parents did. Also, it’s painful to acknowledge that one’s child has unhappy feelings. But, theory schmeory, I put Perry’s ideas to test in the wild, AKA my house under lockdown: one of my five-year-olds was having a meltdown, screaming that he never got to have any fun any more because we couldn’t go to softplay. I bit back what I wanted to say, which was: “For God’s sake, you have millions of toys – play with them!” Instead, I went full Perry and said: “I can see that you’re upset, and I’m sorry this is so hard. Soon we’ll be able to go to softplay, but I know it doesn’t feel fair right now.” Then he – I swear I’m not making this up – calmed down and, after a little bit of snuffling, played with his millions of toys.
“When you’ve been a therapist for as long as I have, you realise most parents are not evil bastards,” she says. “They are really lovely people who have been given the wrong tools. They love their children, but they treat them like chores.”
Perry and I are talking by video chat, which feels faintly absurd because, for a while, she was my neighbour. She and her husband, the artist Grayson Perry, rented temporary accommodation on my road while their home of several decades was having renovations. She was living near me when The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read came out, and as its success snowballed, her confidence palpably grew.
“When you have different ideas to what your parents had, you think, I’m doing a very naughty thing for thinking like this,” she says. “So it’s a wonderful reassurance to know that my ideas are OK”.
Another benefit to success is that she is no longer seen as merely her husband’s plus-one. Perry has been with Grayson since 1987 after meeting him at an evening class. (“I thought I was there to learn creative writing, but I think it was probably to look for a baby father,” she says. Their daughter, Flo, was born in 1992.) After he won the Turner prize in 2003, people would look past her to find him or tell her: “I always wanted to meet your husband!”
“Very fragile ego here, so I had a bit of a narcissistic injury,” she says with an exaggerated frowny face. In true psychotherapist style, she finds the narrative, rooting it in her childhood: “I’m a narcissist because I could have done with a bit more attention as a child. But if I’d had enough attention then I wouldn’t have written the book. So it’s all OK.”
OK for her, a bit stressful for some of us around her. When Perry was my neighbour, I had three children under four. She and Grayson were always delightful when I’d bump into them. But if there’s one thing that makes you feel like a worse parent than shouting at your children in the park, it’s shouting at your children in the park in full view of your neighbour, the parenting expert, who has written a bestselling book about how to stop shouting at your kids.
It’s important to have an individual relationship with each child, because they are not an amorphous lump
At times during lockdown, I was grateful she had moved back to her family home and so didn’t hear the tantrums coming from our house. And I’m not even talking about the kids. “You reach your limit quicker in lockdown, but you can tell your children that you need to be by yourself for an hour and they have to play in the garden, as long as you tell them it’s for you. When you tell them it’s for their benefit so they get fresh air, that’s gaslighting crazy-making,” she says. “But lockdown is a stressor, and stressors make us revert to old patterns. So any attempt to do things differently – ‘I won’t be like my parents, I’ll treat my kids as human beings’ – gets jettisoned and you end up shouting: ‘Get out of my hair! You’re a bad child!’”
Perry grew up in Cheshire, with parents who “liked to think they were upper middle class but were a bit more Hyacinth Bucket”. This was the 1960s, but the atmosphere in the home, she says, “was basically prewar, with all these funny rules: never go to a crying child or they’ll cry for attention, that kind of thing”. Perry looked for affection from animals: her pet dog, the feral cats in the barn next door. “My parents were good people, OK? But they were basically Edwardian.” They packed her off to boarding school at the age of 10 and would send her postcards from their holidays in the Bahamas (“Thanks a lot”).
After graduating from a Swiss finishing school she jobbed around – a bit of secretarial work, managing a McDonald’s – before moving into therapy in her late 20s. She married at 21, divorced nine years later and then found Grayson in her evening class. Why did she choose him as her baby daddy? “He volunteered for the role – not many do! Also, he had a very interesting way of looking at the world. I was then trying to separate myself from the culture I’d grown up in, whereas he was entirely self-made, and I was fascinated at looking at the world through his lens.”
Perry writes that so many of us are confined by the expectations set by our parents. I ask her if she sees that in people’s reactions to Grayson’s transvestism: the reason we’re all shocked at seeing a man in a dress is because we were taught that’s not how the world should be. “I never thought of it like that, but yeah, it was wonderful and freeing to find a man who throws off the constraints of what a man is supposed to look like. So many men have said to me that they’d like to dress like Grayson and I always say: ‘So why don’t you?’ But people really think they can’t be themselves. I suppose him dressing up is a metaphor for him being himself, which is a gift.”
As with any decent parenting book, there are things I agree with in Perry’s book (expecting our children to be always happy puts unnecessary pressure on them to be so), and things I don’t. My general approach is if it’s good for the mother, it’s good for the baby, and if that means putting them down early so I can watch an extra episode of The Crown, then everybody’s winning. But Perry is less blithe and writes: “The needy stage is just that, a needy stage, whereas our work, friends and other leisure pursuits can be picked up when this small person does not need us so much.” But only once did I think she was being unrealistic, when she describes walking home from the supermarket with Flo, and stopping when her then young daughter wanted to watch an ant on the pavement. “I realised that it didn’t matter when we got home,” she writes. If I stopped every time one of my children wanted to look at something on the pavement …
“You’d never get home!” Perry cackles. “Yes, it is much more of a juggling act with more children, and that’s why I added in a chapter about siblings in the paperback.” One of the rules in the new chapter is to not refer to the children as “the children”, but rather always as individuals: “My sister and I were always ‘the girls’, ‘the children’. But it’s really important that you have an individual relationship with each of them, because they are not an amorphous lump.”
I ask Perry if that’s why she had one child, because it’s more difficult to maintain the kind of emotional engagement she advocates with multiple offspring. “I actually wanted two but guess what? You can’t always design these things,” she says breezily. “Now I’m THE WORST mother of a 28-year-old girl because I’m always going: ‘You broody yet, darling?’ And she says: ‘GAWD, will you stop with all the pressure?’”
• The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) by Philippa Perry is published by Penguin Life (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.