My six year old son, full of the usual six year old genius, put some grass on his teammate’s head. You know, as boys do. As children have been doing since the beginning of time and probably some grass related equivalent before that.

The other boy’s dad came over and asked me to get my son to stop. Fair enough, I heard him. So I took a breath and I said, honestly and without any drama, that my son is autistic and has ADHD and that I choose my battles carefully. Grass on a head on a rugby field, I told him, is not one of them. Nobody is getting hurt.

He told me it was not right. That he needed to protect his son.

“From grass?” I said.

And it escalated from there.

Here is what I want you to sit with for a moment. I am raising a child with complex, challenging and at times extreme behaviours. Every single day I am making hundreds of quiet decisions about what to address, what to redirect, what to let go, and what to save my energy for because I know my son and I know what actually matters. That is not lazy parenting. That is considered, exhausting, relentless parenting that most people never see.

And yet. The same parents who talk endlessly about gentle parenting, about empathy and connection and not shaming children, have called me a bad mother more times than I can count. Because my son is anything but gentle. Because he does not fit their vision of what a well managed child looks like. Because I do not perform the kind of visible, performative control they have come to expect on a sideline.

They want gentle parenting for their children and zero tolerance for mine.

Here is the thing. I grew up with four brothers. Four. Rough, tumble, chaotic, loud, wonderful brothers who thought putting things on each other’s heads was basically an art form. Grass was the least of it. I have seen things. I have survived things. I emerged from that childhood with thick skin, a good sense of humour, and absolutely zero fear of a Tuesday afternoon at rugby.

I am Gen X. We were raised by people who had their own stuff going on. Who sent us outside in the morning and expected us back at dark. Who told us to sort it out amongst ourselves and meant it. Who used phrases like “because I said so” without any follow up attachment theory.

And honestly? We turned out fine. We are resilient. We are resourceful. Most of us have excellent senses of humour. We know how to be bored without imploding.

I am now raising my son in a world where every feeling must be named, validated, processed, and gently redirected with a carefully worded “I see you are frustrated, sweetheart.” Where every rough and tumble moment is treated like a safeguarding incident. Where every bit of mates being idiots together is a behaviour that needs unpacking. And where apparently, grass is a threat.

And then there was the pass the parcel incident.

I went to a kids party recently where someone had the absolute audacity to play pass the parcel the old fashioned way. One parcel. One winner. The way God and the 1980s intended. The music stopped, a child won, everyone clapped, life went on.

Except it did not. Because the parents absolutely lost the plot.

There were murmurings. There were looks. There were actual conversations happening amongst the adults about the fact that their child had not received a present. At a pass the parcel. Where there is traditionally one present. That is literally the whole point of the game.

I grew up playing pass the parcel where you sat in a circle, passed a badly wrapped box around to whatever cassette was playing, and if the music stopped on you it was your lucky day and if it did not you cheered for whoever won and ate your fairy bread and got on with it. Nobody needed to process their feelings about it. Nobody’s parent intervened. You just learned, in the most gentle and delicious way possible, that sometimes you win and sometimes you do not.

That is not a trauma. That is a Tuesday. And also, great preparation for actual life.

Because here is what I keep coming back to: life is not fair. We do not all win the prize. The job does not always go to the most deserving person. The wave does not always break the way you want it to. And if we spend their entire childhood wrapping our kids in cotton wool and engineering every outcome so they never feel the sting of missing out, we are not protecting them. We are setting them up to be absolutely blindsided by adulthood.

Now look, I am not here to be a troll. I actually love some of what the conscious parenting generation has brought us. The awareness. The emotional vocabulary. The intention behind it. These are genuinely good things. I believe we can be more conscious parents than our own parents were.

But at some point we crossed a line.

My generation was told to toughen up, sometimes too harshly. I get that. But the pendulum has swung so far the other way that we are now raising kids who do not know how to handle a world that does not orbit around them. And the world will not orbit around them. The world has a very full schedule already.

I think about my brothers a lot when it comes to this. The scrapes and the chaos and the working it out between themselves taught them things that no amount of carefully worded conversations ever could. They learned how to read a room, take a hit, laugh at themselves, and show up for each other. That happened on the oval, in the backyard, and yes, in moments involving grass.

As a mother, a surfer, someone who got knocked off her board ten thousand times before she could ride it, I know this: discomfort is not the enemy. Discomfort is the teacher.

A kid who falls out with a friend and works it out. A kid who loses the game and feels it and still shows up next week. A kid who does not win pass the parcel and claps for the kid who did. A kid who gets grass on his head at rugby and laughs about it at dinner. That kid is being prepared for life. Not protected from it.

For those of you still on your way to motherhood, I want you to know this. The courage and the trust and the resilience you are building right now on this journey is not wasted. It is exactly what your child will need to see modelled. A mother who knows how to sit with hard things. Who knows that not every wave goes your way. Who knows the difference between a real problem and a bit of grass.

That mother is already in you. She is being shaped right now.

I am not saying we stop being kind, warm, connected parents. I am saying we also let our children be humans in a world that is sometimes muddy, sometimes unfair, and sometimes full of other six year olds doing ridiculous things with grass.

They can handle it. They are, in fact, built for it.

And so are we.

Belle x
Still on the sideline. Still standing by the grass.