As the award-winning director and screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless In Seattle, You've Got Mail and Bewitched, NORA EPHRON is celebrated as one of Hollywood's frankest and sharpest wits. Now 65, she has written a hilarious and moving collection of essays about ageing. Here, in the last of our exclusive series, she shares her experience of bringing up her children - and takes an irreverent side-swipe at the modern concept of 'parenting': I want to begin by saying that when I gave birth to my children, which was not that long ago, there was almost no such thing as parenting as we know it today.
There were parents, of course, and there were mothers and fathers, but the concept of parenting was in its very early stages, if it existed at all. Here's what a parent is: a parent is a person who has children. Here's what's involved in being a parent: you love your children, you hang out with them from time to time, you throw balls, you read stories, you make sure they know which utensil is the fork, you teach them to say please and thank you, you see that they have an occasional haircut, and you ask if they did their homework.
Every so often, sentences you never expected to say (because your parents said them to you) fall from your lips, sentences such as: 'Do you have any idea what that cost?' 'Because I say so. That's why.
' 'I said now.' 'Stop that this minute.' 'Go to your room.
' 'I don't care what Jessica's mother lets her do.' 'A tiara? You want a tiara?
' Back in the days when there were merely parents, as opposed to people-who-were-engaged-in-parenting, being a parent was fairly straightforward. You didn't need a book, and if you owned one, it was by Dr Spock, a paediatrician, and you rarely looked at it unless your child had a temperature of 103, or the croup, or both. You understood that your child had a personality.
His very own personality. He was born with it. For a certain period, this child would live with you and your personality, and you would do your best to survive each other.
'They never really change,' people often said (back in those days) about babies. This was a somewhat mystifying concept when you first had a baby. Exactly what was it about the baby that would never change?
After all, it's incredibly difficult to tell what a baby's exact personality is when it's merely a baby. (I'm using the word 'personality' in the broadest sense, here) But eventually the baby in question began to manifest its personality, and, sure enough, remarkably enough, that personality never changed. For example, when the police arrived to inform you that your eight-year-old had just dropped a dozen eggs from your fifth-floor window on to the street below, you couldn't help but be reminded of the 14-month-old baby he used to be, who knocked all the string beans from the high chair to the floor and thought it was a total riot.
Back in those days - and once again, let me stress that I am not talking about the 19th century here, it was just a few years ago - no one believed that you could turn your child into a different human being from the one he started out being. T. Berry Brazelton was the paediatrician who supplanted Dr Spock in America in the Eighties, and his books divided babies into three types - active, average and quiet.
He never suggested that your quiet baby would ever become an active one, or vice versa. Your baby was your baby, and if he ran you ragged, he ran you ragged; and if he lay in his crib staring happily at his mobile, that was about what you could expect. All this changed around the time I had children.
You can blame the women's movement for it. One of the bedrock tenets of the women's movement was that because so many women were entering the workforce, men and women should share in the raising of children; thus, the gender-neutral word 'parenting', and the necessity of elevating child-rearing to something more than the endless hours of quantity time it actually consists of. Conversely, you can blame the backlash against the women's movement - lots of women didn't feel like entering into the workforce (or even sharing the raising of children with their husbands), but they felt guilty about this, so they were compelled to elevate full-time parenthood to a sacrament.
In any event, suddenly, one day there was this thing called parenting. Parenting was serious. Parenting was fierce.
Parenting was solemn. Parenting was a participle, like 'going' and 'doing' and 'crusading' and 'worrying'. It was active, it was energetic, it was unrelenting.
Parenting meant playing Mozart CDs while you were pregnant, doing without the epidural, and breast-feeding your child until it was old enough to unbutton your blouse. Parenting began with the assumption that your baby was a lump of clay that could be moulded (through hard work, input and positive reinforcement) into a perfect person who would some day be admitted to the university of your choice. Parenting was not simply about raising a child; it was about transforming a child, force-feeding it like a foie gras goose, altering, modifying, modulating, manipulating, smoothing out, improving.
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