I FOUND myself at a social gathering last week. It was one of those ones where you have to sit around a big table with people you don't know.
It was one where you have to make conversation for an hour while trying not to have a strong opinion on anything or mention politics or any Northern Ireland-related topics that might offend people you'll never see again. It was fun.
I was sat at a table with a number of other women, a fair few of whom were mothers.
We talked about the weather for a time and, when they discovered I was from the north west, they said that was nice. One of them said that they felt 'country people' were 'far nicer people in general' than those from the city.
I wanted to tell them I could list five 'country people' off the top of my head who had murdered someone in the last two years.
But I bit my lip and let them have their fancy city slicker notions.
Then we started talking about our children. One mother said that her little girl was taking maths lessons on a Saturday morning now, to help her stay ahead at school.
I closed my eyes and imagined myself waking my own teenager from his slumber of a Saturday morning to inform him he was off to extra maths lessons and the apocalyptic vision that was created wasn't remotely pretty.
Another mother said that her child was taking Mandarin Chinese lessons in the evenings, three times a week.
She said she felt it would help him in his business career. He was seven, she said.
And so it went on, as is frequently the way when mothers get together, that we went around the table and each mother's child had an activity better and more complicated and requiring much more intelligence than the last.
One mother's child was smarter and more fabulous than the other's until it descended into an all-out fight-to-the-death best parenting competition.
I was surprised that many of them had their kids' lives mapped out for them, and were guiding them into careers before they had even left primary school.
The mother whose child was doing extra maths was going to go on to be an accountant. Another mother had aspirations of her daughter becoming a doctor, another an architect. One wanted her son to get into banking, another would be going into law like his daddy.
They asked me what I wanted my kids to be when they grow up. I said I wanted them to be happy.
"A hippy?" one of them asked me, laughing, obviously unable to decipher my wild and unruly country bumpkin twang. No, I told them. Happy. I want them to be happy at whatever they want to do in life. If they love maths and want to be an accountant then that's brilliant, if they want to be an astronaut and want to fly rocket ships to the moon, I'll be 100 per cent behind them.
If they want to be a bloody hippy, tour the world, grow a beard and play guitar on a beach at sunset, then that's absolutely fine too.
I don't put my kids under pressure to be anything, I told them. I want them to seek out their passion, find out what they love – by themselves – and then nurture that until it can become a career so that they never feel like they are working. I want them to be instead astounded that they are getting paid to do something they absolutely love. And I hope I am leading by example by doing that very thing every single day.
I suppose they might have mustered less disgusted expressions had I got up from my chair and run circles around the table barking in the manner of a dog who has just spotted the postman.
I also suppose pushy parents the world over might think me lazy in my parenting approach. Piling pressure on kids to compete, to achieve and to be the best just creates messed-up adults. And I'd rather have a family of hippies any day of the week.
