I'll be honest with you. My parenting veered from hypervigilance to carelessness. Obsessive about keeping the kids informed about politics (poor things). Utterly obsessed with homework and television, not so worried about sex before marriage since who knew if these wretched children of mine would ever bother to walk down the aisle and you can't be celibate forever. Nearly four decades in and not a skerrick of confetti in sight. Where did I go wrong?
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So this is a column about the choices we make. The choices we make about life: about sex education, about politics, even about Barbie. Please be patient. It's not about the huge commercial support for a plastic figurine with tiny feet because that's incredibly obvious. It's not about the nuts and bolts of sex education, or the name by which this is often known, the facts of life. By the time you read this column, you've already had sex and I hope it was as good for you as it has been for me so far. And, politically, it's not about accepting Labor factions as a fact of life. I wish they weren't.
Let me start with the factions first because in this house, people, we eat the vegetables before we get dessert. In a speech to the Per Capita think tank's John Cain lunch on Wednesday, Fenner MP Andrew Leigh said "not being in a faction should be as valid a choice as joining a faction". He doesn't argue ALP factions should be banned but truly, it shouldn't have to be a fact of life in order to get ahead. "The result will be a stronger, more competitive, more democratic and more effective Labor Party," he said.
The number of people I know who have been forced to join a faction (despite their own non-binary preferences) to progress in unions and in the ALP itself is wild. And that's not the worst of it (we've all been in jobs where we've been forced to do stuff we hate). It's the way the jobs are allocated on the basis of factions that is ridiculous. Do we get the best people for the job this way? Let me bring to your attention one Senator Deborah O'Neill, she of the forensic unravelling of PwC, ably assisted by her sister-senator-in-committee, the Greens' Barbara Pocock.
Senator O'Neill, as a late-developer, is not yet a minister. Could she unseat one of the underperformers at the next round? The Labor Party makes choices and sometimes they are extremely strange ones. I can count several current ministers who are being pathetically wet but apparently the factions make the decisions about who gets put forward to be a minister. I'd like this to be forensically unravelled in front of all of us!
I did my best to unravel mysteries of life for my kids. For example, I started my kids on pop-up books, including The Facts of Life by Jonathan Miller, before they started school and had many many conversations about sex, pleasure and relationships well before they were having any. My obsession with trying to limit televiewing was about all the rubbish we saw, the manufactured hysteria. The weird relationships between men and women, the ridiculous number of commercials, the beauty ideals - this is what I was trying to avoid.
Which makes you wonder how I allowed Barbie in the house. Yep, battalions of Barbies, enormous boobs, stupid legs and feet so tiny someone of her stature would just topple over. Stereotypical Barbie is the factional system of the Labor Party - where you try to get everyone neatly aligned. Shame that doesn't work for any of the rest of us.
I let my kids cut Barbie's hair, decapitate her, recapitate her. We never had a bonfire of the Barbies although sometimes, I would step barefooted on one of those idiotic shoes and my middle of the night language could have started a fire. Yep, despite my humorlessly feminist approach to raising children, Barbie was our space invader and I let her in. My kids remember I even subscribed to some magazine which came with Barbie outfits of different nationalities. So was I a bad mother?
Turns out, Barbie doesn't have the hugely negative effect on children's feelings about body image that we feared. The bloke who 30-odd years ago decided, with colleagues, to compare Barbie's measurements to real life women says now he is not convinced by attempts to blame Barbie for everything.
Timothy Olds, the Bradley Distinguished Professor at the University of South Australia, who began academic life as an exercise physiologist, says: "I'm not entirely sure that body image is influenced by Barbie." There is no evidence, in my household at least, that we spent big on corsets (Barbie's waist is teeny) or wanted to bind our feet (those feet are 13 standard deviations smaller than the average woman's foot).
Good thing she's got flat feet in Barbie the Movie. I feel somewhat closer to her now.
And I'm extremely - extremely - spiritually close to Melissa Kang, co-author with Yumi Stynes of Welcome To Sex, a guide to sex and sexuality for young people, which has now been pulled from the shelves by Big W because its staff were being abused.
Two things. One: Big W should get the same staff trainers as Bunnings which heroically fought off the loony cookers at the height of the pandemic era. Two: the book is now on bestseller lists everywhere.
Kang, a mother of three and longtime Dolly Doctor, says she, too, made choices about how to bring up her kids.
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Like me, she was crazy strict about television. But she, too, could not care less about Barbie.
"I never wanted to look like her. I never saw her as an ideal," she says.
And her new book is all about ensuring young people don't have wacky ideals, either. It acknowledges a wide array of bodies and choices.
A good message for all of us, including the Labor Party.
- Jenna Price is a regular columnist and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.
