So, is this a bad father?
H, a 42-year-old writer, lives in Notting Hill, West London, with his executive wife C and their sons Constantin, 12, and Ivan, ten.
The lies started when my eldest son was less than ten months old.
Invitations to attend a child's birthday party or, worse, a singalong session were met with the same refrain: 'I would love to but I just can't spare the time.'
The wife was dispatched in my place, and almost always returned complaining that my son had been singled out for pitiful stares by the other parents.
I confess that I was probably out on the links or taking a country drive instead. Of course I love my children as much as any father, but the truth is I found such events so boring that I made up any excuse.
I can't say which activity I dreaded more: playing Pass The Parcel at parties with a child who permanently crawled away from the action towards the priceless knick-knacks, or listening to the other parents go on about such excitements as teething and potty-training. Mind-numbing!
To be honest, I spent much of the early years of my children's lives in a workaholic frenzy because the thought of spending time with them was more stressful than any journalistic assignment I could imagine.
Kids are supposed to be fulfilling, life-changing, life-enhancing fun: why was my attitude towards them so different?
While all my mates were sidelining important careers and occupying their afternoons with football practice, I was begging the wife to read my two a bedtime story. What kind of father hates reading bedtime stories? A bad father, that's who, and a father who is bored rigid by his children.
I know this is one of the last taboos of modern society. To admit that you, a father of the new millennium, don't find your offspring thoroughly fascinating and enjoyable at all times is a state of affairs very few men are prepared to admit. We feel ashamed, and unfit to be fathers.
It's as though fatherhood is an exclusive private club and everybody is a member except for us few. But then, kids have become careers, sometimes the Last Career, for millions of men who have previously trained for years to enter professional fields of business. Consequently, few of those men will admit that they made a bad, or - worse - a boring career move to fatherhood.
My children have got used to my disappearing to the gym when they're doing their prep (how boring to learn something you never wanted to learn in the first place).
They know better than to expect me to sit through a cricket match, and they've completely given up on expecting me to spend school holidays taking them to museums or enjoying the latest cinema block-boster alongside them. (I spent two hours texting friends throughout a screening of Pirates Of The Caribbean the other day).
Am I a lazy, superficial person because I don't enjoy packing up their sports kit, or making their lunch, or sitting through coffee mornings with other parents discussing how Mr Science (I can't remember most of the teachers' names) said such and such to Little Johnny and should we all complain to the headmaster.
At this point in the conversation, my mind drifts to thoughts of my own lunch and whether it will be nice enough later for tennis.
The others tease me for my inability to know anything about school life. But since when did masterminding 20 school runs a week become an accomplishment? Getting a First at college was an accomplishment.
The trouble for a father like me is that not being completely and utterly enthralled with, dedicated to and obsessed with one's children is a secret guarded, if not until death, then until someone else confesses first. When I mentioned this article to my friend C, travel editor of Harpers & Queen, the relief on his face was instant.
For years he's listened to his friends proselytising on the sublime experience of fatherhood. 'But no one ever told me how boring it is,' he moaned.
When I brought it up at lunch yesterday, my friend J, a stay-at-home dad of three young children, admitted that 'children are mind-numbingly boring' and the act of being with them all day and night is responsible for many mental breakdowns. 'Looking after children makes men depressed,' he concluded.
All those glossy magazine spreads showing celebrity dads looking serene at home with their children serve only to make men feel inadequate. What the pictures don't show is the monotony, loneliness and relentless domesticity that goes with child-rearing.
They don't show the tantrums, the food spills and the ten aborted attempts at putting on shoes. They don't show the wife legging it so she doesn't have to change a nappy, either.
Research tells us that fathers drink the most when they have young children. Is that because talking to anyone under the age of ten requires some sort of lobotomy?
A, an art director with two young children, admits that he considered jumping off a bridge in the early stages of fatherhood. 'Bringing up children is among the most boring and exhausting things you can do,' he says.
His solution was to avoid subjugating his own life to that of his children's. 'I'm certainly not traipsing around museums or sitting on the floor doing Lego if that's what you mean by being at home,' he explains. 'I'm loving it, but my children fit into my life and not the other way around.
'I have friends who spend their lives driving their children to and from activities, but I don't want to spend my life on the North Circular'.
Those of us who are not thoroughly 'child-centric', meaning we don't put our children's guitar practice before our own ambitions, are made to feel guilty. We're not meant to have an adult life - at least, not one that doesn't include them.
Many of my friends - fortysomething, university-educated professionals who swore that they would be normal parents - make it a policy now that 'our kids go where we go'. They drag their three-year-olds to dinner parties where the youngsters end up in front of a video all night. (I have seen children having tantrums in front of guests, and rather than send the children to their rooms, the parents send their guests home.)
So how have we reached this point where so many intelligent men are subverting their own needs and desires to that of their children?
Much of our current obsession with parenting has to do with the cult of child sychology. 'Parents in the Fifties were led to believe that if they weren't with their children, the children would be disadvantaged,' says psychologist Eva Lloyd. 'It started this ridiculous "kids first" culture. We live in an age when parenting is all about martyrdom.'
Psychiatrist Dr Alvin Rosenfeld, author of The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding The Hyper-Parenting Trap, adds: 'To be a good parent today, you have to sacrifice a lot.
'When the current generation of mothers was young, children were simply appendages.
'Our parents would never cancel an adult activity to get us to a soccer game. They would often not show up for our games or school plays, and, as a consequence, they never witnessed our great triumphs or were there to comfort us in our humiliations. As a result, our generation said we would do it differently.'
So it is drummed into fathers that if we find our children stressful or dull, it's because there's something wrong with us (but not career mums, of course, who have a ready-made excuse for being out of the house all day because they 'have to go to work').
And yet many men have spent years studying and then working so that we would not have to do a job as menial as full-time parenthood. I consider spending up to 30 hours a week sitting behind the wheel of a 4x4, dropping children off at play centres or school, to be a less-than-satisfactory reward for all those years of sweat.
Besides, in my view, making a child your career is a dangerous move because your marriage and sense of self can be sacrificed in the process.
Psychotherapist Kati St Clair has listened to the frustrations of scores of fathers. 'Men now feel great pressure to enjoy their children at all times,' she says. 'The truth is, a lot of it is plain tedium. It's very unlikely that a father doesn't love his child, but it can be very dull. Still, it takes a brave man to admit that.'
All us bored fathers can take comfort from the fact that our children may yet turn out to be more balanced than those who are love-bombed from the day they are born.
Research increasingly shows that child-centred parenting is creating a generation of narcissistic children who cannot function independently.
'Their demand for external support is enormous,' says Kati St Clair. 'They enter the real world totally ill-prepared. You damage a child just as much by giving them extreme attention as you do by ignoring them altogether. Both are forms of abuse.'
Child experts are increasingly begging parents to let their kids be.
'Parents think they can design their children by feeding them a diet of Mozart - well they can't,' says Dr Rosenfeld.
Sometimes, apparently, the best thing parents can do for their children is to let them be bored.
This, of course, makes fathers like me - who love their children but refuse to cater to their every whim - feel vindicated. By sticking to our guns, we have unwittingly created children who can do things like make up stories (very few kids can any more).
Because I have categorically said: 'I am not a busboy, a driver or a janitor,' my children have learned to put away their plates and tidy up their rooms. They've become brilliant planners, often inviting their friends to come for the weekend (because I've forgotten to bother).
Frankly, as long as you've fed them, sheltered them and told them they are loved, children will be fine. Mine are - at the risk of sounding smug - well-adjusted, creative children who respect the concept of work. They also accept my limitations.
They stopped asking me to take them to the park (how tedious) years ago. But now when I try to entertain them and say: 'Why don't we get out the Monopoly board?' they simply look at me woefully and sigh: 'Don't bother, Dad, you'll just get bored.'
How right they are.
Adapted VERY SLIGHTLY from this article here
I'm just curious (please read the original article too) why does the parent in question sound like SO much worse of a parent when the gender is female?
The lies started when my eldest son was less than ten months old.
Invitations to attend a child's birthday party or, worse, a singalong session were met with the same refrain: 'I would love to but I just can't spare the time.'
The wife was dispatched in my place, and almost always returned complaining that my son had been singled out for pitiful stares by the other parents.
I confess that I was probably out on the links or taking a country drive instead. Of course I love my children as much as any father, but the truth is I found such events so boring that I made up any excuse.
I can't say which activity I dreaded more: playing Pass The Parcel at parties with a child who permanently crawled away from the action towards the priceless knick-knacks, or listening to the other parents go on about such excitements as teething and potty-training. Mind-numbing!
To be honest, I spent much of the early years of my children's lives in a workaholic frenzy because the thought of spending time with them was more stressful than any journalistic assignment I could imagine.
Kids are supposed to be fulfilling, life-changing, life-enhancing fun: why was my attitude towards them so different?
While all my mates were sidelining important careers and occupying their afternoons with football practice, I was begging the wife to read my two a bedtime story. What kind of father hates reading bedtime stories? A bad father, that's who, and a father who is bored rigid by his children.
I know this is one of the last taboos of modern society. To admit that you, a father of the new millennium, don't find your offspring thoroughly fascinating and enjoyable at all times is a state of affairs very few men are prepared to admit. We feel ashamed, and unfit to be fathers.
It's as though fatherhood is an exclusive private club and everybody is a member except for us few. But then, kids have become careers, sometimes the Last Career, for millions of men who have previously trained for years to enter professional fields of business. Consequently, few of those men will admit that they made a bad, or - worse - a boring career move to fatherhood.
My children have got used to my disappearing to the gym when they're doing their prep (how boring to learn something you never wanted to learn in the first place).
They know better than to expect me to sit through a cricket match, and they've completely given up on expecting me to spend school holidays taking them to museums or enjoying the latest cinema block-boster alongside them. (I spent two hours texting friends throughout a screening of Pirates Of The Caribbean the other day).
Am I a lazy, superficial person because I don't enjoy packing up their sports kit, or making their lunch, or sitting through coffee mornings with other parents discussing how Mr Science (I can't remember most of the teachers' names) said such and such to Little Johnny and should we all complain to the headmaster.
At this point in the conversation, my mind drifts to thoughts of my own lunch and whether it will be nice enough later for tennis.
The others tease me for my inability to know anything about school life. But since when did masterminding 20 school runs a week become an accomplishment? Getting a First at college was an accomplishment.
The trouble for a father like me is that not being completely and utterly enthralled with, dedicated to and obsessed with one's children is a secret guarded, if not until death, then until someone else confesses first. When I mentioned this article to my friend C, travel editor of Harpers & Queen, the relief on his face was instant.
For years he's listened to his friends proselytising on the sublime experience of fatherhood. 'But no one ever told me how boring it is,' he moaned.
When I brought it up at lunch yesterday, my friend J, a stay-at-home dad of three young children, admitted that 'children are mind-numbingly boring' and the act of being with them all day and night is responsible for many mental breakdowns. 'Looking after children makes men depressed,' he concluded.
All those glossy magazine spreads showing celebrity dads looking serene at home with their children serve only to make men feel inadequate. What the pictures don't show is the monotony, loneliness and relentless domesticity that goes with child-rearing.
They don't show the tantrums, the food spills and the ten aborted attempts at putting on shoes. They don't show the wife legging it so she doesn't have to change a nappy, either.
Research tells us that fathers drink the most when they have young children. Is that because talking to anyone under the age of ten requires some sort of lobotomy?
A, an art director with two young children, admits that he considered jumping off a bridge in the early stages of fatherhood. 'Bringing up children is among the most boring and exhausting things you can do,' he says.
His solution was to avoid subjugating his own life to that of his children's. 'I'm certainly not traipsing around museums or sitting on the floor doing Lego if that's what you mean by being at home,' he explains. 'I'm loving it, but my children fit into my life and not the other way around.
'I have friends who spend their lives driving their children to and from activities, but I don't want to spend my life on the North Circular'.
Those of us who are not thoroughly 'child-centric', meaning we don't put our children's guitar practice before our own ambitions, are made to feel guilty. We're not meant to have an adult life - at least, not one that doesn't include them.
Many of my friends - fortysomething, university-educated professionals who swore that they would be normal parents - make it a policy now that 'our kids go where we go'. They drag their three-year-olds to dinner parties where the youngsters end up in front of a video all night. (I have seen children having tantrums in front of guests, and rather than send the children to their rooms, the parents send their guests home.)
So how have we reached this point where so many intelligent men are subverting their own needs and desires to that of their children?
Much of our current obsession with parenting has to do with the cult of child sychology. 'Parents in the Fifties were led to believe that if they weren't with their children, the children would be disadvantaged,' says psychologist Eva Lloyd. 'It started this ridiculous "kids first" culture. We live in an age when parenting is all about martyrdom.'
Psychiatrist Dr Alvin Rosenfeld, author of The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding The Hyper-Parenting Trap, adds: 'To be a good parent today, you have to sacrifice a lot.
'When the current generation of mothers was young, children were simply appendages.
'Our parents would never cancel an adult activity to get us to a soccer game. They would often not show up for our games or school plays, and, as a consequence, they never witnessed our great triumphs or were there to comfort us in our humiliations. As a result, our generation said we would do it differently.'
So it is drummed into fathers that if we find our children stressful or dull, it's because there's something wrong with us (but not career mums, of course, who have a ready-made excuse for being out of the house all day because they 'have to go to work').
And yet many men have spent years studying and then working so that we would not have to do a job as menial as full-time parenthood. I consider spending up to 30 hours a week sitting behind the wheel of a 4x4, dropping children off at play centres or school, to be a less-than-satisfactory reward for all those years of sweat.
Besides, in my view, making a child your career is a dangerous move because your marriage and sense of self can be sacrificed in the process.
Psychotherapist Kati St Clair has listened to the frustrations of scores of fathers. 'Men now feel great pressure to enjoy their children at all times,' she says. 'The truth is, a lot of it is plain tedium. It's very unlikely that a father doesn't love his child, but it can be very dull. Still, it takes a brave man to admit that.'
All us bored fathers can take comfort from the fact that our children may yet turn out to be more balanced than those who are love-bombed from the day they are born.
Research increasingly shows that child-centred parenting is creating a generation of narcissistic children who cannot function independently.
'Their demand for external support is enormous,' says Kati St Clair. 'They enter the real world totally ill-prepared. You damage a child just as much by giving them extreme attention as you do by ignoring them altogether. Both are forms of abuse.'
Child experts are increasingly begging parents to let their kids be.
'Parents think they can design their children by feeding them a diet of Mozart - well they can't,' says Dr Rosenfeld.
Sometimes, apparently, the best thing parents can do for their children is to let them be bored.
This, of course, makes fathers like me - who love their children but refuse to cater to their every whim - feel vindicated. By sticking to our guns, we have unwittingly created children who can do things like make up stories (very few kids can any more).
Because I have categorically said: 'I am not a busboy, a driver or a janitor,' my children have learned to put away their plates and tidy up their rooms. They've become brilliant planners, often inviting their friends to come for the weekend (because I've forgotten to bother).
Frankly, as long as you've fed them, sheltered them and told them they are loved, children will be fine. Mine are - at the risk of sounding smug - well-adjusted, creative children who respect the concept of work. They also accept my limitations.
They stopped asking me to take them to the park (how tedious) years ago. But now when I try to entertain them and say: 'Why don't we get out the Monopoly board?' they simply look at me woefully and sigh: 'Don't bother, Dad, you'll just get bored.'
How right they are.
Adapted VERY SLIGHTLY from this article here
I'm just curious (please read the original article too) why does the parent in question sound like SO much worse of a parent when the gender is female?