I'm looking at this report in the Guardian according to which 20 per cent of parents have forgotten how to bath their children. Well, gosh. Let's just say I'm surprised. What happened? They used to know how to run a bath, check the temperature of the water and then put, or help, the child into the bath and follow up with soap and flannel etc - but then it just slipped their minds?
OK, only kidding. That's not what the report's about. It's rather that one in five parents 'say they have forgotten how to play with their children'; or 'no longer remember how to play'. But I'm no less baffled. That some parents either do not have the time or think they don't have the time to play with their children, or that some parents find playing with their children dull and prefer to do other things - points also to be found in the report - makes some kind of sense. However, that people who used to know how to play with their children (or whomever else) no longer remember how to do so, this I find a stretch. What, once they knew how to throw and catch a ball, hold a bat, throw a pair of dice, move a counter across a board, hide and/or seek, pretend to be a circus horse or a gallant prince or a magical threeb, yet now the way of doing all of these things mysteriously eludes them? Yeah. Call it sociology, if you want; to me it looks like a soft claim and a softer get-out.