PARENTING

Help! I’ve Got Playdate Anxiety — and I’m the Parent

Put your big-person pants on and be a parent to be proud of

Whenever one of my kids asks to invite a friend round, I get a bit nervous. You could call it playdate anxiety. My knee-jerk reaction is to say ‘no’. But I’m working on it.

Playdate disaster

I think I was traumatised in early parenthood when the first playdate I arranged turned to disaster.

The memory of the crumpled look on my four-year-old son’s face as his ‘friend’ (let’s call him Jacques) destroyed him with words, still brings me out in sweats.

‘It’s rubbish at your house!’

…and it got worse. Jacques had brought his evil twin. She looked at her brother, and then turned to my son to add insult to injury:

‘It’s rubbish at your house!’

Once they’d left, I swore:

Never again will those brats cross this threshold!

Not the most mature of responses.

A wiser kind of promise could have been something more like:

Never again will I be so ill-prepared!