I can’t stand my children’s whingeing. But secretly I admire it

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When life gives you lemons, it is perfectly reasonable to complain that it didn’t give you lemonade

t’s no exaggeration to say that the emotional vernacular in our house is whingeing. My daughter begins the day’s antiphony as soon as she wakes up. She wants to go downstairs, and she wants me to come with her, and she wants it to happen now. She’s rarely fully conscious when this starts – it’s a reflex as automatic and instinctive as yawning or stretching. Her mother or I will appeal for a few minutes grace, pleading that we haven’t fully woken up yet ourselves.

Our daughter is only three, so her whingeing must simply be endured. But our son is eight and more amenable to reason – at least in theory. A couple of weeks ago we were on a moderately long car journey. Such occasions have provided opportunities for sustained and focused whingeing for as long as transport has existed, and my son was soon complaining bitterly about the length of time it was taking to reach our destination.

Whingeing is a legitimate response to the world and its many dissatisfactions. Like so much of childhood, it tends to get sublimated into other forms of expression in adult life: humour, stoicism, ordinary complaining, offloading onto a therapist. A significant portion of consciousness is, I’m convinced, a vestigial form of childhood whingeing.

 

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