Life

Busy parents sometimes need to slow down and smell the roses

Having returned to university and to journalism this year, life is busy for mum-of-four Leona O'Neill, who recommends that parents pay heed to our children's demands that, now and again, we make time to do nothing in particular with them

Sometimes when you need to make sense of the world, a five-year-old is the best person to turn to
Sometimes when you need to make sense of the world, a five-year-old is the best person to turn to Sometimes when you need to make sense of the world, a five-year-old is the best person to turn to

LAST week I finished up my second year at university, I handed in my last piece of coursework, came home, sat on my sofa for the first time in what felt like weeks and fell fast asleep.

My five-year-old jumping on the sofa beside, nor my son setting off my car alarm with a football, nor a bombardment of questions about dinner, nor a husband using a drill woke me. I think I slipped into some kind of semi-coma.

This year I've gone back to the newsroom, gone back to university, worked days, worked nights, worked weekends, read books in my lunch hours, written essays on buses, chased stories at all hours as well as being a mother to four children; it has been hectic, manic and mad.

I put enormous pressure on myself to be the best mum I can be, to be the best student, to get the best marks and to produce the best stories. I've always been the same. I let nothing slide, and I often run at breakneck speed between them all so that I can give 100 per cent.

The day after I finished university I took my daughter out with me to run some errands. I had things to do and a tight time scale and I found myself telling her as we walked into town to 'Come on!' and 'Hurry up!'

We were rushing past things she wanted to look at – pretty flowers she wanted to see, dogs she wanted to stop and pet, shops with shiny things in the window.

My daughter is like me. She speaks her mind. She takes no nonsense and when she sees something she wants she keeps going until she gets it.

As we hurried down the street she shouted. 'Stop!' at the top of her voice. And I did. She let go of my hand and walked back to the grass verge we had just passed and picked me a buttercup, like she used to when she was very little.

I'm not fantastic at relaxing. I live my live at such a pace that I am always thinking of the next thing I have to do, the next story, the next assignment, the next deadline, the next mortgage payment and how I'm going to achieve that. There is simply never time to chill out and not think about anything in particular.

But when my daughter was standing there, a buttercup in her hand, asking me to put it behind my ear, I felt bad. Really bad. Kids have a funny way of bringing you back down to earth when you lose the run of yourself. I decided there was no better time to wind down, relax and forget about my worries for a while.

She took my hand again and we took a different path to our destination. We wandered at a snail's pace among flowerbeds and we literally stopped and smelled the roses – pink ones, white ones, red ones. We stopped at a stall, she got an ice cream and I got a coffee and we sat on a wall and watched the world pass us by for a whole hour.

I looked at my girl, with the sun in her hair, and her skin so soft and was reminded how utterly remarkable and beautiful she is. We had mad, hilarious conversations and she talked to me about her friends in school. We looked at ants on the ground and stopped to say hello to a dog called Bruno who was the size of a small horse.

We did nothing and we did everything and we as walked hand in hand in the sunshine all the stress disappeared. Sometimes when you need to make sense of the world, a five-year-old is the best person to turn to.

I know there is Tiger Parenting, Helicopter Parenting, Hippy and Happy Parenting, but I adopted Slow Parenting that day, and it's the method of travel from here on in.