A “secret parent thread” has gained traction on Twitter where parents admit the activities they hate doing with their children.
The thread, which was begun by editor Lucy Huber, begins: “This is a secret parent thread where we admit what we HATE doing with our kids. I HATE playing Brio trains with my son. Mostly because I actually like building the train tracks but he just wants to boss me around and nothing I do is right. Also he takes all the good cars.”
One woman replied: “Playing ‘ice cream shop’. My son’s imaginary ice cream shop never has any flavours in stock, except for one, which always changes and he makes me keep guessing flavours until he decides he has one in stock.”
Another parent wrote: “Someone let me know what age they’re supposed to learn ‘yes and?’ because playing imagination games with my six-year-old is like taking notes from Kubrick.”
It wasn’t just mothers spilling the tea on their offspring, however. This father admitted feeling “exhausted” by his daughter’s demands for imaginary make-believe play.
“My child never wants to play any game ever, she wants me to use my imagination and invent something new for her every time, or play Pokémon and invent a story for her, or do battles, or pretend she is a baby monster/Pokémon and I have to raise and train her, and I am tired always,” he wrote.
The original poster replied: “Sometimes mine sits on the couch and asks me to play while he watches and I’m like…no??? Excuse me!???”.
One parent revealed their frustration with their child’s lack of reverence for their colouring-in skills.
“I hate colouring with my kids,” they said. “They never put enough colour on the page and they always get bored and scribble and meanwhile, I’m creating a fashion masterpiece on Elsa and one of them is just going to take a black crayon and draw a big circle over my work.”
Another admitted they were tired of reading out-loud to their son: “My son is only five months but I hate narrating out loud to him, like all the parenting books say to do. I have taken him on approx one million narrated tours of our house and neighbourhood, and it just makes me want to move to a religious commune with mandatory vows of silence.”
The news comes amidst reports that parents are resorting to dipping into their children’s savings to afford to pay for the soaring cost of household bills.
According to a recent survey for The Telegraph, British families are taking £8.5m per day from their children in a bid to cope with the rising rate of inflation.
Of the 2,000 people polled, a third said they had raided their children’s funds this year, while a quarter admitted taking money to pay for increasingly expensive food shops.
