"What's all this shouting? We'll have no trouble here!" - When home turns into an instagram-unfriendly tween Warzone - a ReadItTorial

Forgive me for a bit of a parenting ramble this week for our #ReadItTorial. It's easy to come away from most parenting blogs or people's instagram feeds with a sense that folk live in some sort of weird idyllic Stepford-Wives style existence where everything's perfect, everything's calm and peaceful, squeaky clean and life is just too peachy for words. 

Of course, the reality is usually different - and away from the tapping of keyboards as folk infest their social media presence with this idyllic pretend lifestyle, under the pretentious veneer there's a lot of mess, a hell of a lot of noise, a lot of shouting, and, at times, some truly spectacular arguments. 

At ReadItDaddy Towers, these shouting matches erupt in microseconds and are usually about something so insignificant that looking back at the arguments you could almost cry at how trivial the element that caused the argument actually is. The end-result is the same though, everyone involved feel utterly wretched afterwards.

Anyone who has children know that if their kids are particularly strong-willed they're like miniature terminator robots. They can't be reasoned with. They can't be bargained with. And they absolutely WILL NOT STOP until they've had a spectacular meltdown. As quickly as these arguments erupt, they're never over and done with that quickly - and sometimes after the millionth repeat of a particular phrase there's often no choice but to step the hell away. 

Last week's biggest bust-up revolved around (of all the damned stupid things) Little Miss deciding that for her school class photograph she wanted "Ariel hair" when her hair had already been done up in a rather stylish 'do. As with most arguments, this one erupted at 5 to 8, 5 minutes before we absolutely have to leave the house in the morning to get the school run under way - or be stuck in crazy traffic, lengthening the journey by anything between 15 minutes and an hour if we dare step out minutes later than usual. 

Mummy and Daughter were completely at odds, and as the argument escalated so did the volume - to the point where I (two floors down) wondered what was going on - and what on earth our neighbours thought was going on (probably murder!)

The night before this, there was also a huge blowout about 'not tidying up' after Little Miss had somehow managed to coat the entire floor, herself, and most of the tools she was using with a combination of PVA glue and glitter (how many times do you see Instagrammer parent influencers taking photos of the aftermath of a crafting session? The answer is "Not at all unless they've ruthlessly engineered said photos to somehow look like perfection rather than the result of someone letting off a bomb in Hobbycraft). 

And who was to tidy this up? Little miss? No of course not, don't be silly! Mummy couldn't do it because she was busy trying to sort out things for the next school day and a trip away the week afterwards. Daddy couldn't do it because, quite frankly, I was absolutely knackered after a day at work, an evening cooking, serving up, washing up and then putting away (oh my life, such trials and labours!)

But because I was slumped in a chair drawing in a semi-vegetative state, I was the prime candidate to sort out the mess (which, after more shouting and wailing and crying, I did but not in the best of moods). 

Yes folks, believe it or not we're not just book reading robots, we're human and have hit the colossal brick wall of "Tweendom" head-on. Stupidly, I imagined that the calendar would flip over on the eve of Little Miss's 13th birthday and we'd have until then to mentally and physically prepare ourselves for the 'terrible teens' and endless episodes of stroppy behaviour, general slothfulness and parental hatred, but it looks like it's kicked in a couple of years early, exacerbated by the fact that whenever Little Miss has sleepovers or goes off to guide camp, she doesn't sleep because girls love to chat through the night - and if she doesn't sleep, she's worse than a grizzly bear with a hang-nail. 

So what the heck has all this got to do with books? Well here's a thing. How many middle grade novels have you ever read that A) feature a stroppy tweenager losing his / her rag on a daily basis at their parents or a better question B) feature parents at all C) feature ordinary realistic everyday working parents who feel like they're paddling like mad just to stay afloat?

I have a grand theory that the reason that nearly all middle grade novels dispense with the parents as soon as possible is to avoid the writer having to document page after page of working ungodly hours for a pittance, ranting, raging, crying and stroppiness. Far easier to concentrate on a child protagonist who doesn't have any of those issues. 

What, also, has this got to do with the rise and rise of influencers versus bloggers? As I've mentioned several times in this article, real honest to goodness non-cardboard-cutout-non-robotic-non-stepford folk know damned well that as fine and dandy as it is to whack up a few gorgeous looking photos of you enjoying (insert whatever product you've been sent to shill on your massively followed Instagram feed), no one 'real' is fooled. 

Thinking back to some of the books we've featured on the blog that are so beautifully and perfectly well observed when it comes to depicting child behaviour, I wonder if anyone's got the moxy to do something like this for parents in middle grade books...? Fair enough, we're always being told that kids don't want to read books featuring grown up characters who don't live an idyllic existence but...If you know of one, hit us up on twitter @ReadItDaddy (because Blogger's comments are utterly tripe and never seem to work for anyone!! GAH!)