DON'T TELL YOUR MOTHER!

I don't want to worry any of you young parents out there in Kidworld, but you wouldn't believe the things my kids got up to without me finding out until much later. In some cases, much MUCH later. It was enough to make your hair curl.

You see, it was my belief that children need to have at least some time without an adult breathing down their necks in order to become independent as they get older. They should be making dens and climbing trees - that sort of thing. I still believe that, despite the risk. Sometimes it wasn't easy for me to let them, so it's just as well I didn't know about some of it or I'd have got out the cotton wool and started wrapping them up.

Apparently, or so they tell me, they used to climb out of the upstairs bathroom window, drop down onto the lean-to roof and somehow get down to the ground and out into the garden. How did I not notice this? 

But the thing that really makes me come out in a cold sweat is the suite of underground rooms and tunnels they constructed. I can only assume they have exaggerated this story. I mean, I knew they were digging a couple of holes in the garden, that was all. Or so I thought. Apparently, it was all done properly, reinforced and all that, but it surely can't have been safe. They could have been buried alive! Eventually they were rumbled when their Dad noticed the tunnel entrance and put a stop to the whole thing. I suspect it was a case of ‘don't tell your mother’ in case I had a hairy fit. I was told they had been trying to make a tunnel but had been made to fill it in. I didn't find out the extent of the excavations until many years later when all danger of hairy fits had passed.

I used to let the boys go out to play in the fields near where we lived. I knew they had a wonderful time out in the fresh air and sunshine, and came home happy although maybe a little grubby and damp. What I didn’t know until recently is that they had been riding down the river on home-made rafts. Aaargh!

I was aware that two of my little girls had managed to escape from the garden and take themselves off for a walk. That was bad enough, and gave us all a fright. Oh, the relief when they were found! But what I didn’t find out until much later was that these two had set out hoping to find a short cut to Heaven. Logical, really, as they had been told what a brilliant place it was. I still don’t know how they intended to find it, and I don’t like to ask. Enough guilt already.

There was a place in our large garden where a small person could squeeze himself, unseen from the house, through into a neighbour’s garden. I didn’t know about this until the neighbour turned up on our doorstep with a grubby toddler who was wearing a cheeky grin, a T shirt, and nothing else.
‘Is this one of yours?’ she asked. What could I say? Naturally it was one of ours, no point in denying it. I swear the older kids had been tunnelling under the fence.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. They survived, and some of their happiest childhood memories come from the stuff I didn’t know about. My conviction that kids need a certain amount of freedom to learn about risk and consequences for themselves remains unshaken.
Come to think of it, some of my own happy childhood memories are of times spent without adult supervision.

There are things that my mother was never told!