I am not a perfect parent. I don’t think that’s a thing that exists. But I will do everything in my power to get relatively close, and most days that has to be enough.
I started a series on TikTok recently, you know, just general things I’m learning and weaving as a first-time mum. The intent wasn’t really to give people advice; it’s just working notes. Something my daughter can listen to one day. My last piece was about trying your hardest, and this felt like the honest next step. I wanted to share what trying my hardest actually looks like in this season. Then the comment section erupted lol.
People on the internet are unhinged. Not disagreeing, just straight up unhinged. And the more of a presence you have, the more you exist publicly in any form at all, the more people arrive with strong opinions about a life they’ve watched for ninety seconds. I understand now why Beyoncé doesn’t talk to us. (I am not Beyoncé. I still get it.)
But underneath some of the noise, there were a few real questions, so in true fashion I said, let me also write about it.
What I was given
My parents did an incredible job of one specific thing - they really believed in letting us try anything. Not “you will be excellent at this.” Just a small….. go and see.
So I tried dancing. Anyone who knows me knows I cannot dance. I have two left feet, no rhythm to speak of, a genuine tragedy. One of my sisters could dance; she was part of a dancing community, and I remember her Jamaican friends coming round and dancing in our house, which is almost certainly why I still love bashment. I watched all of that and thought, oh, I cannot wait for my turn. For when I turned 16 and joined a dance club. Well, my turn came (I laugh thinking about it), but it was not good; I was not good. Disclaimer: I can throw a wicked whine, though, so there are some great hip movements.
But nobody made me feel like I’d failed at something. I’d simply found the edge of one thing and was free to go and look for another.
That’s basically the inheritance I’m trying to pass on to my little princess, and it cuts both ways. I took my daughter to ballet, and she did not care for it. She did not want to be a ballerina; she didn’t even want to enter the class (clearly her introverted nature peaks when assessing new environments). I might have quite liked her to be a ballerina. She’s three-ish so I might try again. I’m Nigerian so we got to push a little.
The languages
I was raised in Europe, where a second language isn’t a party trick; it’s plumbing. So I see languages the way I see swimming: it’s a life skill rather than an achievement. I have no idea whether my daughter will be a lawyer, a doctor, or something none of us has a word for yet. But if she wants to move through the world, live in other countries, or work anywhere, she’ll need more than one way to speak.
Also, and I’m being honest here, another language is extremely useful when you want to be nosy. People say remarkable things in front of you when they’ve decided you can’t follow. That’s a story for later… but someone was talking about hurting me in a language they thought I didn’t understand.
So……Yoruba first. It’s my mother tongue and my actual first language. English is my second language, which surprises people because I was raised in London. Speaking to her in Yoruba is easy for me because it’s the version of me that isn’t translating anything. She now corrects me. “Mummy, no.” Three years old, editing her mother.
French, because she’s at a French-speaking school, and she will absolutely correct my French too, the missed word, the accent she has decided is wrong. Mandarin, which I think everyone should pick up and which I personally cannot; the few phrases I have, I have entirely because of her. And Spanish, because we live in California, you know old Mexico iykyk.
Then there’s the wider circle. Every aunty, uncle and friend in our world who speaks another language, we ask them to speak it to her. German, Arabic, sign language. She’s exposed to far more than she’s formally learning, and that’s deliberate too.
Yes, private school is a privilege, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But school isn’t really the mechanism; it’s part of the infrastructure
The Zoom call with her cousins
My siblings and I are scattered. I’m in the US. Some are in Germany, some outside the UK, some in London, some in Nigeria. We are genuinely everywhere, which means our children could very easily grow up as strangers who happen to share a surname.
So every weekend the kids get on a Zoom call together. Classes, technically. Really it’s a bonding activity wearing a lesson plan. They’re learning Yoruba, which means the mother tongue is doing two jobs at once: it’s a language, and it’s a rope between countries.
And when she comes off that call and tells me what cousin K and cousin Z did today, she lights up. That’s the entire return on the investment. When I catch up with my siblings, we talk about how we wished we had a similar infrastructure with our cousins, but Zoom wasn’t around then.
Everything else
She swims. She plays piano. She plays football, usually with her dad, a sport I have love for as an Arsenal supporter, which is rather the point. Some of what she does, neither of us particularly enjoys. However, if she showed interest, then we would allow her to explore it. Like when she jumped on the piano at home and started playing one day. She probably watched us play and didn’t want to be left out. Sometimes you just have to spot the gift and get out of its way.
Now the harder part. Or rather the part that had TikTok in a tizzy calling me a strict parent.
Raising a child in the iPad generation is genuinely difficult, and I don’t want to be smug about it, because I understand exactly why the iPad exists. It exists because parents are exhausted and need twenty minutes.
But between five and seven, when she’s back from school, I have two hours. Two. And I’ve decided those are development hours, not screen hours, not because I’m above it, but because of the simple maths of it. How I see it is that if I hand her an iPad so I can have more time to myself, I’ve just spent the only time we had.
So we go for very long walks, and I ask her about her day. Sometimes we swim or just go to the beach. Mornings run the same way, but I truly cherish those moments.
I think we often forget that children need to see you doing things. Not doing things for them. Just doing things. I’ll sit on the sofa and read a book, and within a few minutes she will appear with a book of her own. Nobody instructed her. She’s just copying me - sometimes she will ask me to put the book down and play with her toys.
Which obviously goes the other way. If she sees me on my phone constantly, because I’m building a business and the business lives in my phone. There was a whole season where she kept asking for her own phone, and I had to sit with the uncomfortable arithmetic of where she’d picked that up. So now the phone goes on do not disturb, or into a different room entirely. Just genuinely out of reach, so she gets uninterrupted time (it’s hard).
I know the window closes. The older she gets, the more of the world she’ll be exposed to and the less of it I’ll be choosing. But while she’s under my roof and I still have some say over her environment and her habits, this is where I’m spending that day.
The social calendar
Children have the busiest schedules known to man. There is always a party. Always a playdate, always somebody’s birthday, always a group of them descending at the park or the house with the nannies.
So I try to hold both ends. I take her to adult things, so she can watch how adults actually speak to one another, a skill that you can’t really teach directly. And I join in properly with the kid things, not from the bench with my phone out. It lets me be whimsical. It puts me back in touch with the version of me who wasn’t managing anything.
So — back to the comments.
“She’s learning too many languages.” “Why can’t she just be a kid?”
What do you think children are doing with their time? They are learning, constantly, whether or not anyone has decided to be intentional about the input. It was never a question of whether she’d absorb something. The question is what.
I will also whisper and say that it’s fine to notice your child is bright and build around it. Mine is extraordinarily intelligent, and fully believes she is one of the girls, and I’m not going to shrink either of those things to make a stranger online comfortable.
Parent however you parent. I mean that sincerely. I’m not describing a system, I’m describing what one very busy woman is doing with two hours a day and a great deal of hope.
Ask me in ten years whether any of it worked. I genuinely don’t know.