Parenting

The boy has lots of friends – and happily ignores them all | Séamas O’Reilly


Jerry Seinfeld once said your first birthday party and your last are quite similar, in that it’s generally arranged for you and you have to be told who your friends are. I think about this a lot when my son ends up at a little pal’s soiree and we watch the assembled children attempt to make sense of the rituals we’re forcing on them. Just last week he was at his dear friend Bill’s house for a birthday party and studiously ignored him the entire time. I mean, I say dear friend, but as Seinfeld suggests, I’m not sure if my son knows that he has any dear friends – or wants them for that matter.

It’s one of those weird bits of parenting that makes you feel like a child yourself; wielding your infant like an inanimate object, an incompatible toy forced to play with some unsuited partner. It’s the same way I might have made my sister’s Barbie hang out with a stack of pogs, or driven Spiderman around in the Batmobile alongside his steadfast partner, a shiny Panini sticker of the 1996 Bayern Munich squad.

My son is sociable now and appears to enjoy the company of other people, it’s just he won’t be forced into it by his needy parents. So his playdates with Bill or Manu or Huw follow a familiar pattern. They’re gorgeous kids, which is handy because we like their parents a lot – if they were little horrors it would be awkward indeed – but when we get them together, it’s distinctly unclear whether any of them know that the other is there.

For the most part, they’re polite, but don’t seem to take our cues that they are supposed to be forging eternal soul friendships, or worse, they react against our slightly pushy recommendations and actively ignore each other. They do show an interest in each other’s toys, but generally have the air of people who’ve been sent on an office away day, but with colleagues who work on a different floor. At Manu’s birthday party, our boy didn’t leave the ball pool. During a recent theatre trip, he shunned Huw as if they’d just had a very awkward spat on LinkedIn. When we went to soft play with Bill last month, I’m fairly sure they made a pact beforehand to not interact until they’d tried each slide, pit and obstacle in total isolation. At his birthday it was much the same; two little planets orbiting each other in respectful obliviousness.

In the end, this could itself be the spirit of true friendship: the ability, nay desire, to exist peaceably in silence around each other. Maybe if we only stop fretting, they’ll relax into it a bit more naturally. I was once fond of saying that most friendships are forced upon us, by parents, geography, or school classes. And perhaps there is a limit to what we can do from above. I’ve noticed, after all, that Spiderman and Bayern Munich don’t hang out much these days, so perhaps I should avoid making the same mistake.

Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats





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