Dad's World: Who really is doing the cajoling?

Jonathan deBurca Butler on the joys - and travails - of fatherhood.

BUT I don’t want to go to school. School is silly — Fionn is up and he’s not in a happy place. Upstairs his mother tries her best to cajole him out of bed.

Eventually she succeeds but still the tears come streaming down his face as he descends the stairs like a jaded orang-utan.

“Daddy,” he says in his I’ll-chance-my-arm-with-this-parent voice. “I don’t want to go to school today.”

More often than not when Fionn is being like this he’s simply in a grump but today there might be more to it.

I go up the stairs and meet him halfway.

“Sit down here beside me,” I say.

There’s no argument which usually means he is willing to listen. It’s a start.

“Why do you not want to go to school?” I ask.

“Sinead will be there but sometimes she doesn’t want to play with me and she just plays with Bradley and sometimes Bradley doesn’t want to play with me and Sinead gets cross and she plays with him and not with me.”

I’m trying my best to work out exactly who and what he’s actually talking about. At times Fionn’s stream of consciousness monologues are something akin to a play by Beckett and at eight in the morning that can be tough going.

I managed to get the gist; something was up with him. He’s a sensitive little man and when things aren’t quite going right for him he can get upset.

Often something small might trigger tears but the underlying frustration has been there for a while. Our first little boy is a smart kid, he thinks about things — that sometimes has its downsides. He needed a boost.

“Do you remember the other day when I didn’t go into work?” I said. “You remember I was sick and I couldn’t go in?”

He nodded and fiddled with the bannister.

“Well when I went in the next day, everyone asked me where I had been. They said ‘hey where were you yesterday? We had no fun’.”

“If you don’t go into today,” I continued. “All your friends will be sad and they probably won’t have as much fun. I think you should go.”

“But I want to go to the zoo with you,” he said.

We were supposed to go at the weekend but between the jigs, reels, storms and winter closing time we just didn’t make it.

“Oh, but all the animals are in school too,” I said.

“No they’re not,” he said with a disbelieving smile.

He had come round. Indeed by the time I was leaving for work five minutes later the form had positively changed from that of a reluctant scholar to a guy who wanted to get to Oxford.

Later that afternoon I came home to be greeted by one chipper little man.

“Daddy! Guess what?” chimed Fionn. “I went to school today and Sinead wasn’t cross.”

“And did she play with you?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said, proud as punch.

Later that evening, I discovered that after my little pep on the step, mummy had weighed in with her own bit of advice. “I just told him that he should go in there and come up with a game of his own and play it with Bradley,” she explained in a matter-of-fact manner, while unpacking the shopping.

“I told him he had to play it cool with Sinead and that if she saw the two boys playing a good game she’d come over and want to join in.”

She paused for a moment, her hand still in a shopping bag.

“Did it work Fionn?” she asked

“Yep,” he said as he gobbled down a large spoon of raspberry yoghurt.

“There you go,” said Ciara giving me a nod and a wink.

She removed a box of teabags from the bag, turned lightly on her heels and put it in a cupboard above the sink.

“Now,” she said. “What’s next?”

She was quietly delighted with her herself.