A Spoonful of Sugar. Liz Fraser
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every day, or even every week when they’re little, have a “homework time”. That could be Saturday afternoon, or each day at 4 p.m. Whatever fits your family. That way it won’t get forgotten, and eventually it becomes a habit: Four o’clock is homework time. Then there’s no pushing and forcing them to do something – they know that’s what they do at that time. It’s clearer for them, and much easier for you.’
Granny’s Pearl of Wisdom
Routine is vital in a child’s life. It needn’t be unnecessarily strict, but a basic pattern of what happens when provides a very important and useful structure to their lives, and helps to get them mentally prepared for each part of the day, for example, playtime, homework, bed.
Talking about the importance of routine with Granny has come at a very useful time for our family: as the kids are starting to get more homework and also have music practice to do each week, taking Granny’s advice and putting a certain time aside each day for these things has meant we actually get everything done, and aren’t scrabbling around with homework diaries the morning it’s due in! It even means weekends are more relaxed because I know we’re on top of things. Such a simple tip and such good results! Wish I’d thought of it ages ago …
Something that happens in a family home with remarkable and frustrating frequency is that someone gets ill. If it’s not a baby with diarrhoea it’s a toddler with chicken pox or a teenager with flu. Or, worse still, Daddy with a cold. Lord save us all! Illnesses fly through families like WAGs through a department store, and just as one person is showing signs of recovery, the next is sniffling and coming down with it. What should take three days for one person turns into a month of hell for everyone, and then we all start again with the next lurgy.
But here’s an interesting thing: once upon a time, people knew how to deal with common illnesses. If a child had a cold you’d feed her home-made chicken soup, give her a hot bath and put her to bed for a week. For stomach bugs you’d eat nothing at all or nibble on dry bread, keep the fluids going and wait till it worked its way out. For flu, my grandfather used to wrap us up in a freezing cold, wet sheet, causing our bodies to go into a kind of panic, sweat profusely, almost pass out and then sleep for twenty-four hours – before waking up with no symptoms whatsoever. Except possibly a desire to shout at him very, very loudly. (He was a medical man, incidentally, so it wasn’t quite as bonkers as it may sound, though I would urge you NOT to try this at home!!)
Old wives’ tales and ‘secret remedies’ passed down the generations, and, bar some nasty outbreaks of smallpox and the plague, many people did just fine with home remedies and bit of common sense.
Here’s a favourite family story: when I was six years old my entire family spent Christmas with my aunt and uncle at their home near Edinburgh. Also present were their three children all under the age of five, my grandparents, two other sets of uncles and aunts and their various infant offspring, three beagles, two Labradors, four cats, two kittens and a budgerigar. And nine kilts. It was, as you can imagine, a jolly, noisy, colourful gathering, but no one could have predicted the fall-out that this event would produce.
I am certain that the warm glow of my aunt’s pride could be felt as far away as the Outer Hebrides, as she served up the now infamous salmon mousse starter. It was pink; it was light; it was delicious.
It was also chock-full of salmonella.
Over the next twenty-four hours every member of the family spent time getting to know their toilet bowl better, and, as one of the youngest members of the Fraser Clan, I was the first to go. As luck would have it, this coincided with one of the very few occasions my parents were supposed to be going out for the evening, and something as inconvenient as a daughter at death’s door wasn’t going to stop them. Fair enough.
I was left alone in the house with my granny looking after me. And what fun it was! She tucked me up in bed with an entire year’s collection of Oor Wullie and The Broons, brought me water every so often – and watched to make sure I drank it – and largely let me get on with trying not to be sick any more. I wasn’t fussed over, she didn’t call a doctor, I didn’t require urgent medical attention. I got time and rest and peace. And I got better.
These days a child with a severe stomach bug is more likely to be either packed off to school with a smile and an ‘Oh, she’s totally fine now – just a twenty-four-hour thing!’ or be bundled off immediately to the doctor who would be expected, and most probably pressured, to say something conclusive at the end of his three-minute examination, prescribe some ointment/pills/tonic or treatment that was guaranteed to rid the patient of all her woes within six hours and do so without looking the slightest bit as though the adult bringing her in was totally barking and should take a chill pill herself.
The level of concern, worry and even occasional panic levelled at the health of our children seems to me to be deeply ironic, given that kids have a far higher chance of survival today than they have ever had. We are bombarded with news stories every week telling us of yet more ‘killer bugs’, poisonous food, deadly additives or hidden nasties just waiting to zap your kids into oblivion.
As well as actually getting ill less frequently than ever, we also have more understanding of the causes and cures of most of the common ailments that befall our little darlings than anyone could have dreamed of fifty years ago. We can do more than ever to avoid illness and treat it effectively if it does strike, and yet we worry like nervous fleas about our children conking out at the first sign of a sniffle or sneeze.
We are a nation of health obsessives who pop pills as though they’re going out of fashion and live on a diet of hysterical, often misinformed or exaggerated health-scare news.
So what can Granny tell us about dealing with common illnesses in her day that might calm our nerves and save the NHS spending several billion pounds a year on unnecessary antibiotics?
‘Well, we had all sorts of childhood diseases that, thanks to vaccinations, you lot don’t come across so much any more.’
‘Good point. And would you call a doctor about those straight away – they could be very serious.’
‘Not always. You knew chicken pox when you saw it and there’s not much you can do about it until it goes away. If anything you wanted the whole family to catch it and be done with it!’
Aha, the famous chicken-pox parties; very sensible idea I think. Nothing more annoying than spending one entire summer holiday seeing Child A through chicken pox only for Child B to get it in time for Christmas.
‘You had to be careful of a child with mumps,’ she recalls, with a somewhat sterner than usual expression, adding another line to her already time-worn but still beautiful face. ‘You had to keep them in the dark, as the mumps really affected their eyesight, and they had to be warm. Mine all had mumps, but it didn’t last long. You just expected it then.’
My mother-in-law has told me of the fearful time when my husband contracted mumps as a child. When he was four she could get the thumb and index finger of one of her hands to meet around his thigh bone. She still speaks of it as one of the worst episodes of her life, and it’s a terror I can only hope I never come to experience – that of believing you might lose a child. And to think that I recently panicked because I’d run out of Calpol when one of my kids had a slight fever – what a nincompoop!
Granny goes on, rubbing her ankle in the hope of getting some blood into it. It looks totally lifeless, cold and white – much like the doctor who allegedly prescribed her a dose of aspirin and a hot water bottle would look now if I could get my hands on him.
‘Now whooping cough was a nasty one. Such a noise they made! I put