Playground Politics

Like every social group, the playground contains a fascinating mix of differing personalities, parenting methods (if you’re me, most other parenting methods are better than mine because how else do you explain just how frightful my children’s behaviour is compared to others?) and varying levels of willingness to get involved with the school fund-raising, extra-curricular clubs or classroom assistance activities (for NO money, NO reward and VERY SORE FEET, and despite the fact that we all pay a big chunk of council tax which allegedly makes our education “free”…and yet still I am the mug running the café single-handedly at the school Christmas Fair…). A completely non-scientific study has brought the following different breeds of playground politician to my attention:

·         Domesticated Dad: A rare breed indeed, this is the Dad who appears to have all his children’s educational requirements entirely under control, without the need for spreadsheets  or barked orders from Mum. Domesticated Dad is an endangered species.

·         Harassed Mum: These people almost always have full time jobs, or part time jobs which actually manifest themselves as full time jobs once Harassed Mum has finally completed the last thing she needs to do before managing at last to extricate herself from the office, amid rumblings from her full time colleagues (who accomplish in their full time hours around 90% of what Harassed Mum accomplishes in her part time hours) about “Flipping Part Timers”. These are the people who always volunteer to help out at school functions, and it’s normally through a sense of guilt caused by them not being able to do the school run on a regular basis.  Always the last to find out what’s going on, unless of course she happens to bump into The Oracle on one of her rare visits to the school, thus obtaining a full download of the week’s occurrences in one sitting, and that’s only if she doesn’t have a meeting she has to be at.

·         The Oracle: The person who knows absolutely everything, and I do mean everything, about any occurrence, recent or otherwise, which has taken place in and around and often also outside of the school catchment area. Every single school in the country has at least one of these. This person knows facts long before they appear in the public domain, and with a frightening level of accuracy.

·         The Gossip: Normally obtains material from the Oracle, but will take input and turn into output any information at all, whether it is accurate or not, since information is not subjected to any sort of verification process. A sort of News of the World in human form. News communicated via this person travels faster than the speed of sound, especially if it’s bad or inaccurate news.

·         Greater-spotted Power-magnet: These characters are attracted to the school management team like un-be-wellied children to a muddy puddle. Their strategy is to befriend the head teacher. Their modus operandi is a thinly disguised brown-nosing campaign, with the ultimate objective of ensuring a smooth path through school for their offspring. It almost never works, because quite frankly head teachers are just not that daft.

·         Lesser-spotted Power-magnet: These people choose instead to hang around their child’s class teacher, in the mistaken belief that if they do so, the fact that their child is a lazy, good-for-nothing trouble maker will somehow pass unnoticed. This is an alternative to the awful prospect of having to alter their parenting techniques. This is rarely successful, unless of course the classroom teacher is spectacularly naïve, in which case fair play to the Lesser-spotted Power-magnet for spotting and exploiting a navigable loophole.

·         The Bad Egg: The parent who has a well-beaten path to the head teacher’s door through the horrific behaviour of its young. Usually engenders a strange dichotomy of feelings from other parents – extreme sympathy because of the frequent appearances before the beaks, tempered by self-righteous fury at the treatment of their own children at the hands of the little horror(s) belonging to the Bad Egg.

·         Earth Mother: The uber-calm Mum with a long string of children, all of whom are always perfectly washed, dressed and on time for school, with all the right homework, money and correspondence in their school bag, and all of whom behave beautifully. Earth Mother has never been carpeted  by the head teacher. Earth Mother does not participate in gossip. Earth Mother never shouts at her children. Face it, we all are simultaneously fascinated by and pissed off with Earth Mother, compounded by the fact that we can’t help but like her. We have absolutely no idea how she gets through all that laundry. We can only imagine she has access to some house-elves (see below).

·         Freeloader: Arguably, the most sensible parent of all. The one who does not get involved in helping out with any of the school activities or fund-raising, but fully expects its child to benefit from it all. I suspect this parent believes an army of unpaid house-elves comes along and does all the work, whilst the rest of us are sleeping.

I’m Harassed Mum by the way, with possibly a side order of the makings of Bad Egg (although I am on the run from the beaks and they have not caught up with me as yet, but as we all know this is only a matter of time), and the polar opposite of Earth Mother. In case you hadn’t already worked it out. Engineer is most definitely Domesticated Dad. Which one are you??