Olly Mann: Balls To It!

I’m aware that occasionally in this column I’ve made it seem as if I have an idyllic relationship with my kids.

That I’ve written a little too often about how joyful it is to walk them to school, expand their imaginations at the library or stand with them aside a train track and point at the locomotives.

That they’ve taught me so much. That it’s all been life-affirming.

So, let me be clear: parenting two young boys is unbelievably stressful, and a lot of the time they are utter jerks.

They are nearly constantly hitting each other, moaning, making stupid noises, winding each other up, mooning at me, jumping on the sofa, jumping on the dog, rolling their eyes, spitting, kicking, whingeing, crying and completely ignoring me. 

Actually, it’s not even what they do that’s irritating, but what they don’t do, despite me pleading with them until my throat is hoarse: wash their hands, put their shoes on, brush their teeth, do their homework…

And those cute photos I’ve posted to social media, portraying them as cherubs? Pure PR.

Sure, there may have been the odd "Kodak Moment" for which they paused to stroke a farm animal, stroll through the forest or play pooh-sticks, but believe me: behind the scenes we’ve had to frog-march them back to the car because they’ve jumped in a puddle, lost a welly in the mud and collapsed on the floor in hysterics because the gift shop was closed.

With two children under seven, you come to accept this way of life, on the presumption that, at some point, this supposedly "cute phase" will end.

Indeed, misty-eyed parents of smartphone-addicted teens urge you to appreciate these early years, before your offspring treat you solely as a taxi service, start up their own OnlyFans, and have no ostensible interest in whether you live or die.

But now our older one, Harvey, is about to turn eight; an age by which he really should be able to sit in a restaurant without scrambling under the table, walk round a supermarket without having a tantrum in the toy aisle, and get out the car without running into oncoming traffic.

We’re not there yet. I suspect this is mainly because of his younger sibling: when you have a four-year-old brother, it’s easy to keep behaving appallingly, yet still appear relatively grown-up by comparison.

That said, there are signs that he wants to change; that he himself feels he is on the cusp of being a Big Boy, and is simply struggling to suppress the disruptive instincts that motivate him to misbehave.

After all, his baby teeth are falling out. He can now concentrate sufficiently to watch full-length David Attenborough programmes. He "knows" about Santa. 

In the old days, this would presumably be the moment to pack him off to boarding school with a tuck box and laundry bag, so a moustachioed military man could paddle some common sense into him.

Fortunately, we are in the new days, and thus it has become necessary for my wife and I to spend our evenings desperately brainstorming how we might nudge him encouragingly towards more bearable behaviour.

Bribery, obviously, was our first port of call: we got one of those magnetic "star charts" and stuck it up on the kitchen wall.

A simple enough concept: seven days of consecutive good behaviour equals a Hot Wheels dinky toy.

The problem was that once the toy had been achieved, Harvey had no particular motivation to be pleasant: his objective fulfilled, the next toy was evidently too distant a goal to aim at.  

I turned to my friend Ben, an educational psychologist, to ask if there was a way of simply talking Harvey into better behaviour. It turned out there is, but it involves sitting down with him for 30 minutes each time he misbehaves and reviewing his anger control.

Thirty minutes! To discuss emotional intelligence with a child! Ugh, I’d require some sort of star system myself to endure it…

So, in the end, we’ve duplicated what they use in his class at school: a "marble jar".

If he, for example, tidies up after dinner, or walks home without giving his brother a wedgie, a marble is added to the jar. If he refuses to go to bed, or lobs a half-eaten banana at me, he loses a marble.

When the jar is full, he gets a treat of his choice. 

This system, we’ve found, has the advantage of being adaptable for both praise and punishment.

There are benefits for us, too: when he’s being a total nuisance, I hesitate to admit, I take a small amount of vindictive pleasure from removing a marble and seeing him get more upset (not a healthy emotion on my part, to be sure, but perhaps better than shouting in his face).

The key, obviously, is to ensure we praise his achievements so that each one is celebrated, until they (hopefully) become second nature. I’m optimistic this can be enshrined by the time he is nine…so then we’ll just have the little one to worry about. Right?