ALBERT, the youngest, is the latest in a long line of boys who forgets to tell me what ingredients he has to bring into school for food tech until the morning he needs them.

“You’ve got to stop leaving things until the last minute,” I scream, for the umpteenth time, while rummaging through the kitchen cupboards in search of honey and oats for his flapjacks.

I am sure his teacher throws in a few wild cards just to try to catch parents like me out: “Pumpkin seeds? You want pumpkin seeds? Ha! Look what I’ve found,” I say, throwing a pack of half-eaten, out-of-date pumpkin seeds triumphantly on the kitchen table.

Next, while Albert has his breakfast, I tip a box of Alpen cereal and a pack of ‘luxury muesli’ into a bowl, extracting anything that looks orange or yellow and depositing them on the kitchen scales.

With just 30 seconds before it’s time to leave, I think I’ve done it: “There, that looks like 50g of ‘tropical dried fruit’ to me,” I announce. Job done.

“Oh, I forgot,” says Albert as he runs out the door, handing me a letter dated before Christmas about money due for a school trip.

After he has gone, I notice he has left his dinner money on the kitchen table.

Having been through this five times, you would think that, by now, I might have worked out how to get a boy to listen, respond and follow basic instructions. Yet number five is just as disorganised and chaotic as number one was all those years ago.

But now I have come across a book that could be the answer to my prayers: Calmer, Easier Happier Boys: The Revolutionary Programme that Transforms Family Life, by behaviour specialist Noel Janis-Norton.

She has identified something called the ‘Boy Brain’. Due to its ‘immature auditory processing’, she says, often all boys hear is: “Blah, blah, blah.” I could have told her that.

But Janis-Norton points out I have been handling it all wrong. Many boys, she says, reach adolescence turned off being sensible because of all the repeating, reminding and exasperated looks and criticism dished out by parents like me.

Boys do not respond well, she says, to being told off too much, with streams of words and instructions coming in faster than they can process: “Nagging and constant telling off don’t work,” she warns.

Her solution involves lots of descriptive praise and eye contact, and giving the Boy Brain time to process words. Slow down, keep sentences short, with few clauses, and repeat key words and phrases, she says.

I tried it when Albert and his 16-year-old brother Roscoe got home: “Mum, what’s wrong with you?” said Roscoe, who clearly hadn’t taken in any of my very, very slowly enunciated words as I looked him in the eye. “You’re acting really weird.”

I think they miss the nagging...

WHEN I got a text from my friend Juddy to tell me her much-loved cat Tom, who had been missing nearly two weeks, had turned up safe and well, I happened to be walking along the street with my 19-year-old, Patrick.

I had just been telling him that day about how upset Juddy was about her favourite cat.  I showed him the text: “Tom is back. I cannot believe it. I am ecstatic. An old lady found him – very famished in her garage this morning,” it read.

Hearing that Tom was trembling when Juddy arrived to bring him home, Patrick seemed genuinely moved: “Oh my God, is he OK? And how is Juddy coping?”

He was much more concerned than I thought he might be over the reappearance of a lost cat. ‘What a kind, caring compassionate human being he has turned out to be,’ I thought, silently congratulating myself. ‘I have brought him up well.’

We changed the subject. It was only later that day Patrick - who had obviously only heard ‘Blah, blah, blah’ when I told him about the missing cat - confessed he thought ‘Tom’ was Juddy’s husband.

Come to think of it, he wasn’t half as concerned as he should have been over a human being who had been missing two weeks and turned up starving and shivering in a garage.

Where have I gone wrong?

 

WHAT advice does Janis Norton have for dealing with a Dad Brain?  When our 15-year-old brought me a cup of tea in bed, Dad Brain was put out. “Why didn’t I get tea in bed too?” he asked. It was only when he asked a third time, I told him: “Because it’s my birthday.” Embarrassed silence. I calmly produced a birthday card from the box I keep for such an eventuality: “Can you just go and get the boys to sign this for me?” I said. Mum Brains do come in useful sometimes.