We do our best, us mums and dads. You may not think it, but we do

The conviction that we can deliver a happy childhood to those to whom we give birth is linked to two other unquestioned certainties: That every child is entitled to a happy childhood.

And that a happy childhood is the foundation for a productive and happy life.

YOU can’t pick your parents. It’s so unfair. You get landed with these two strangers you’d never have selected, offered a choice. You didn’t ask to be born to them. If you’d had a choice, you’d have wanted to be born to multi-billionaires. Or to parents who didn’t carry the trailing DNA wires of alcoholism, epilepsy or schizophrenia.

We never get over our childhood. Philip Larkin summed it up: They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad They do not mean to, but they do… But do they, really? You’re twenty now. Or thirty. Or older. Your life is OK but not great. Or maybe it’s ropey as hell. In which case you go into therapy. One gorgeous woman I know, like the blurbs on the back of the paperbacks always say “has it all.” She’s internationally-famous, rich, owns a beautiful home wherein reside her gentle husband and her three daughters. She has more friends than she can cope with. She finds time to do charity work. But she also finds time to visit a therapist, because her days are threaded through with fear, self-contempt and a sense that a great black cloud is about to swamp her.

That black cloud is made up of a million tiny elements from her childhood and her teen years. The father who drank and disappeared. Constantly. The mother who placated and provoked him. The fear of flame that convinced her, every night, that her father’s cigarette had set fire — again — to the couch and that the inferno was building, silently creeping the stairs towards her room. The dread of an invitation to stay the night at a friend’s house, because of the impossibility of inviting the friend back to her house, where, even if her father was in one of his dry periods, she couldn’t control the tendency of the budgie to use the “C” word it had heard so often. The imperative to bring home good marks from school, while never letting on to the teachers that anything was wrong at home. Decent middle-class people kept their problems behind the double doors of the sun porch.

She thought she was free the day she walked into the dream job, the mermaid hair swinging, the grey eyes shining. Only to find, within weeks, that her looks turned the women against her and invited one of the men to assume she was easy. When she wasn’t easy, he took her anyway, in the dark of an office after everybody else had gone home. It was her own fault, she figured, and the best thing to do was take the extra money and the promotion he put her way in order to protect himself.

Her looks became a weapon. Against herself. Since she mattered more because she was gorgeous, she had to stay gorgeous, and if that meant vomiting back up the full tub of Haagen-Daz cookies-and-cream ice-cream, that’s what she did, until her back teeth rotted and a doctor worked out the reasons why she had no periods and her face was hairy.

She’s walking wounded, but she’s walking. And the one certainty she has is that she’ll do better by her three little daughters than her parents did with her.

It’s a kind of religion with her. Not an easy religion. Every day, her mother’s axioms come, unbidden, into her head.

“Clean as you go, when you’re making dinner.”

“Take that smirk off you, young woman.”

“They saw you coming. They always do.”

“Why can’t you be like your sister? Your sister would never have done that.”

“What are you stuffing yourself with that rubbish for? You’ll be the size of a house.”

She knows they were her mother’s mad lassoing of reality in the hope of turning it into something better, of dragging it under control. She knows they never worked for her mother, yet out they come in moments of stress, like when the youngest lies down on the floor in Tesco, screaming and drumming her heels in fury at a treat denied.

She does take some pride in limiting sweets without making a big issue out of it, and of never commenting on the chubbiness of her eldest. That, too, is a reaction against her own poor rearing. She drives forward into motherhood, guided mainly by the rear-view mirror. Tiny, but ever-present in that rear-view mirror, is the reflection of the dysfunctional family that got her where she is, today. Hers, she is resolved, will not be a dysfunctional family.

FIFTEEN years from now, her eldest daughter will blame her career/relationship/weight problems on the kind of upbringing she got. She will bitterly remember the warm positive suggestions that coiled around her teen years like a hungry cobra, choking the breath out of her with their unanswerable appropriateness. She will roll her eyes to heaven and do the “I’m too busy for your idiotic chat” telephone snap when her mother rings her to find out how she’s doing after the breakup with the boyfriend she’d thought was her mate for life. In a fluctuating mess of uncertainties, one certitude will begin to build: when I have kids, I sure as hell won’t bring them up the way I was brought up. My offspring will have a happy childhood.

It’s the triumph of hope (and arrogance) over the sum total of human experience, this conviction that we can deliver a happy childhood to those to whom we give birth. It’s linked to two other unquestioned certainties: That every child is entitled to a happy childhood. And that a happy childhood is the foundation for a productive and happy life.

The first is a sweet — and essentially modern — aspiration. “Childhood” as a separate and cherished period in life, is only a couple of centuries old. Up to then, most surviving children were put to work as soon as practicable.

The idea that a happy childhood guarantees you a better later life is questionable. Among composers, for example, Mendelssohn is about the only one who had a joyous time as a child. The unhappier the childhood, for many artists and writers, the more driven the urge to create, in adulthood.

In addition, it’s only in the last sixty years people concentrated on trying to deliver the happy childhood to their offspring — and it’s in precisely the same time span that objectively measured happiness levels have steadily declined. The sustained effort to improve the lives of children in the developed world has not produced generations of markedly happier adults.

Even today, it’s rare to hear a teenager say “My Mum’s my best friend.” Or “My father is everything I want to be in life.” Or “I have a good thing going on with my parents.”

Maybe we should lower our demands on ourselves as parents.

Feed them, clean them, hug them, listen to them, praise them and apologise in advance for the harm we don’t know we’re doing to them. Perhaps in a Larkin pastiche: We do our best, us Mums and Dads.

You may not think it, but we do.