One of the most thought-provoking opinion pieces I have read for ages was recently published in the UK Times online. In it, columnist and mother Janice Turner wonders when having a child turned you into some kind of privileged being. She begins by describing how her elderly parents – disabled pensioners in their 80s – recently went to their local shopping centre and finding that all the disabled spots were taken, parked their car in a spot reserved for parents with a pram.

Despite the fact that their disabled sticker entitled them to park in such spot (so they were doing nothing wrong), they returned to their car, both with their walking sticks, to discover a note pinned under the windscreen wiper. It read: “This is not a disabled space. This is for parents, you stupid old bastards.”

She writes….

So, it appears that some young and able-bodied mother or father — the note, of course, was anonymous — thought that their own inconvenience in having to walk small children a few yards farther across a car park took precedence over the needs of the elderly couple they had clearly observed struggling inside. And they were so enraged by this injustice that they took out a Biro and penned words calculated to scare or shame them into line.

…When did parents grow so entitled? Obviously this note-writer is at the farthest end of the spectrum. But in recent years there has been a burgeoning belief that to raise a child elevates you to a state of grace, precludes any accusations of selfishness — since motherhood is one, long selfless sacrifice — and the world must listen up to your shrill, me-first demands, however egregious.

This week, a London mother, Lisa Smith, was ordered off a 139 bus because her pushchair was too large to fit into the space reserved for buggies and the driver believed that it was blocking the doors. “He actually wanted me to take my child out into the pouring rain and walk,” she said aghast, as if 19-month-old Oliver dissolves like bath salts when damp. But why, a legion of women were wondering, didn’t Ms Smith do what bus-going mums have always done and fold the bloody buggy?

A decade ago we had no choice. Extract wriggling boy, clutch shopping bags in one hand, wrestle pram’s cussed mechanism with other, catapult across aisle when bus took off. There was no buggy area on buses.

That Ms Smith’s buggy was too humungous even to fit in that space was telling. Pushchairs have expanded like obese toddlers over the years. Many fancier pushchairs are now so unwieldy that they aren’t much smaller when collapsed.

Designers deduce that parents feel entitled to dominate public space and to assume that crowds of commuters will part in awe at the early morning entrance of the Quinny Zap bearing His Majesty the Baby. Indeed, on public transport you witness a reversal of the natural order. Children were once taught to stand up for older folks or at least squeeze two to a seat, the littlest on a lap. Now you see a great lunking line of kids smugly filling a carriage, their own parents standing like stoic pack animals carrying everyone’s coats. I see mothers relegated to the back seats of their own cars, surrendering all hope of adult conversation or control of the radio, so that a seven-year-old can ride up front with Dad.

Little wonder then, if adults feel obliged to deliver ludicrous, super-luxe levels of comfort and care for their children, that they start to regard parenthood as akin to a disability. From Gordon’s “hard-working families” to media mummies penning tear-stained farewells to careers that they can’t combine with caring for one small baby, we never stop hearing how near impossible it is to raise a child.

Yet if you are Western woman, blessed with a healthy baby — and not a single mum trapped in a broken-lifted council flat — motherhood has never been a bigger doddle. The gadgets, the gazillion cartoon channels, a whole internet bubbling with advice and affirmation, the airlines with their early boarding and kiddy pencil sets, the fathers who look after their kids more than any men yet born. A family-friendly faith is universally preached: you can breast-feed in church, let your toddler eat at The Ivy, take your Year 6 son to a White Stripes gig, change a nappy on a pub table at midnight and few would dare to suggest that this is not the right place.

Yet, for all these gains, do parents ever express gratitude or grace? Instead, their dissatisfaction fed by the family-feeding companies flogging them bigger people carriers, flashier prams, they lament only what they lack.

So your baby woke you at dawn, you’ve gained a stone, you’re short on sex or fun or “me time”. Shuffle the playlist, sister. It will pass, all of it, quicker than you think. And the decades will dissolve until you too are struggling across a supermarket car park, barged aside by pious pram-pushers, and wondering how it came to be that caring for your own progeny comes with a free pass not to give a damn about anyone else.

[You can read Janice Turner’s full article here...]

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I have a girlfriend without kids who has secretly confessed to me that she feels the same way. And I’m certain that many women with older kids think the current generation of parents are a pack of whinging wussbags.

So do we really need to harden the %^& up? Or as a society are we just finally giving mothers/parents the respect and support they deserve? What’s been your experience and what do YOU think?