It's the start of the summer holidays, when millions of mothers despair at how to entertain their children for the next six weeks. What none of them dare say is that they would rather their children were still at school or, frankly, anywhere else. Helen Kirwan-Taylor, a 42-year-old writer, lives in Notting Hill, West London, with her businessman husband Charles and their sons Constantin, 12, and Ivan, ten. Here, she argues provocatively that modern women must not be enslaved by their children.

The lies started when my eldest son was less than ten months old.

Invitations to attend a child's birthday party or, worse, a singalong session were met with the same refrain: 'I would love to but I just can't spare the time.'

The nanny was dispatched in my place, and almost always returned complaining that my son had been singled out for pitiful stares by the other mothers.

I confess that I was probably ogling the merchandise at Harvey Nichols or having my highlights done instead. Of course I love my children as much as any mother, but the truth is I found such events so boring that I made up any excuse.

I can't say which activity I dreaded more: playing Pass The Parcel at parties with a child who permanently crawled away from the action towards the priceless knick-knacks, or listening to the other mothers go on about such excitements as teething and potty-training. Mind-numbing!

To be honest, I spent much of the early years of my children's lives in a workaholic frenzy because the thought of spending time with them was more stressful than any journalistic assignment I could imagine.

Kids are supposed to be fulfilling, life-changing, life-enhancing fun: why was my attitude towards them so different?

While all my girlfriends were dropping important careers and occupying their afternoons with cake baking, I was begging the nanny to stay on, at least until she had read my two a bedtime story. What kind of mother hates reading bedtime stories? A bad mother, that's who, and a mother who is bored rigid by her children.

I know this is one of the last taboos of modern society. To admit that you, a mother of the new millennium, don't find your offspring thoroughly fascinating and enjoyable at all times is a state of affairs very few women are prepared to admit. We feel ashamed, and unfit to be mothers.

It's as though motherhood is an exclusive private club and everybody is a member except for us few. But then, kids have become careers, often the Last Career, for millions of women who have previously trained for years to enter professional fields of business. Consequently, few of those women will admit that they made a bad, or — worse — a boring career move to motherhood.

My children have got used to my disappearing to the gym when they're doing their prep (how boring to learn something you never wanted to learn in the first place).

They know better than to expect me to sit through a cricket match, and they've completely given up on expecting me to spend school holidays taking them to museums or enjoying the latest cinema block-boster alongside them. (I spent two hours texting friends throughout a screening of Pirates Of The Caribbean the other day).

Am I a lazy, superficial person because I don't enjoy packing up their sports kit, or making their lunch, or sitting through coffee mornings with other mothers discussing how Mr Science (I can't remember most of the teachers' names) said such and such to Little Johnny and should we all complain to the headmaster.

At this point in the conversation, my mind drifts to thoughts of my own lunch and which shoes I plan to wear with what skirt.

The other mothers tease me for my inability to know anything about school life. But since when did masterminding 20 school runs a week become an accomplishment? Getting a First at college was an accomplishment.

The trouble for a mother like me is that not being completely and utterly enthralled with, dedicated to and obsessed with one's children is a secret guarded, if not until death, then until someone else confesses first. When I mentioned this article to my friend Catherine Fairweather, travel editor of Harpers & Queen, the relief on her face was instant.

For years she's listened to her friends proselytising on the sublime act of mothering. 'But no one ever told me how boring it is,' she moaned.

When I brought it up at lunch yesterday, my friend June, a stay-at-home mother of three young children, admitted that 'children are mind-numbingly boring' and the act of being with them all day and night is responsible for many mental breakdowns. 'Looking after children makes women depressed,' she concluded.

All those glossy magazine spreads showing celebrity mothers looking serene at home with their children serve only to make women feel inadequate. What the pictures don't show is the monotony, loneliness and relentless domesticity that goes with child-rearing.

They don't show the tantrums, the food spills and the ten aborted attempts at putting on shoes. They don't show the husband legging it to the pub so he doesn't have to change a nappy, either.

Research tells us that mothers drink the most when they have young children. Is that because talking to anyone under the age of ten requires some sort of lobotomy?

Arabella Cant, an art director with two young children, admits that she considered jumping off a bridge in the early stages of her career in motherhood. 'Bringing up children is among the most boring and exhausting things you can do,' she says.

Her solution was to avoid subjugating her own life to that of her chil-dren's. 'I'm certainly not traipsing around museums or sitting on the floor doing Lego if that's what you mean by being at home,' she explains. 'I'm loving it, but my children fit into my life and not the other way around.

'I have friends who spend their lives driving their children to and from activities, but I don't want to spend my life on the North Circular'.

Those of us who are not thoroughly 'child-centric', meaning we don't put our children's guitar practice before our own ambitions, are made to feel guilty. We're not meant to have an adult life — at least, not one that doesn't include them.

Many of my friends — fortysomething, university-educated professionals who swore that they would be normal parents — make it a policy now that 'our kids go where we go'. They drag their three-year-olds to dinner parties where the youngsters end up in front of a video all night. (I have seen children having tantrums in front of guests, and rather than send the children to their rooms, the parents send their guests home.)

So how have we reached this point where so many intelligent women are subverting their own needs and desires to that of their children?

Much of our current obsession with parenting has to do with the cult of child sychology. 'Parents in the Fifties were led to believe that if they weren't with their children, the children would be disadvantaged,' says psychologist Eva Lloyd. 'It started this ridiculous "kids first" culture. We live in an age when parenting is all about martyrdom.'

Psychiatrist Dr Alvin Rosenfeld, author of The Over-Scheduled Child: Avoiding The Hyper-Parenting Trap, adds: 'To be a good parent today, you have to sacrifice a lot.

'When the current generation of mothers was young, children were simply appendages.

'Our parents would never cancel an adult activity to get us to a soccer game. They would often not show up for our games or school plays, and, as a consequence, they never witnessed our great triumphs or were there to comfort us in our humiliations. As a result, our generation said we would do it differently.'

So it is drummed into mothers that if we find our children stressful or dull, it's because there's something wrong with us (but not dads, of course, who have a ready-made excuse for being out of the house all day because they 'have to go to work').

And yet many women have spent years studying and then working so that we would not have to do a job as menial as full-time motherhood. I consider spending up to 30 hours a week sitting behind the wheel of a 4x4, dropping children off at play centres or school, to be a less-than-satisfactory reward for all those years of sweat.

Besides, in my view, making a child your career is a dangerous move because your marriage and sense of self can be sacrificed in the process.

Psychotherapist Kati St Clair has listened to the frustrations of scores of mothers. 'Women now feel great pressure to enjoy their children at all times,' she says. 'The truth is, a lot of it is plain tedium. It's very unlikely that a mother doesn't love her child, but it can be very dull. Still, it takes a brave woman to admit that.'

All us bored mothers can take comfort from the fact that our children may yet turn out to be more balanced than those who are love-bombed from the day they are born.

Research increasingly shows that child-centred parenting is creating a generation of narcissistic children who cannot function independently.

'Their demand for external support is enormous,' says Kati St Clair. 'They enter the real world totally ill-prepared. You damage a child just as much by giving them extreme attention as you do by ignoring them altogether. Both are forms of abuse.'

Child experts are increasingly begging parents to let their kids be.

'Parents think they can design their children by feeding them a diet of Mozart — well they can't,' says Dr Rosenfeld.

Sometimes, apparently, the best thing parents can do for their children is to let them be bored.

This, of course, makes mothers like me — who love their children but refuse to cater to their every whim — feel vindicated. By sticking to our guns, we have unwittingly created children who can do things like make up stories (very few kids can any more).

Because I have categorically said: 'I am not a waitress, a driver or a cleaner,' my children have learned to put away their plates and tidy up their rooms. They've become brilliant planners, often inviting their friends to come for the weekend (because I've forgotten to bother).

Frankly, as long as you've fed them, sheltered them and told them they are loved, children will be fine. Mine are — at the risk of sounding smug — well-adjusted, creative children who respect the concept of work. They also accept my limitations.

They stopped asking me to take them to the park (how tedious) years ago. But now when I try to entertain them and say: 'Why don't we get out the Monopoly board?' they simply look at me woefully and sigh: 'Don't bother, Mum, you'll just get bored.'

How right they are.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/fema...FEMAIL&ct=5

i agree..boring

Gupt, YOU'RE boring now. What's become of you?

*ahem* guess i'm the lone voter in the 'children are amazing' category.

i think if you say that you're children are boring ... it says a lot more about you, then it does them!

Nah, I'm with you on that one. Probably the only thing we agree on. Children are great.

I don't have kids, never will, so I don't know if I'm allowed to vote...but I did anyway and said "they are sometimes, isn't everyone, etc."

I love kids...
I think they are amazing...
It's the chores that kids create that are boring...
Cooking special things for them, breast feeding (and smelling like bad cheese all day), changing diapers, bathing them... all that can be a bit overwhelming. But when they start to walk and talk, man are they fun.

I dont have kids, but I am definitely looking forward to....

i think they are fun sometimes.. but if i have to spend time with them all day (like i did as an aupair).. nope.. not gonna do that anymore.. i love them as my own but sometimes it's sooo boring to be with them 24/7

Children? What children? There are children around here?!

kids are amazing and boring all at the same time.

And I thought I had all the options covered in that poll

Geez, FOUR PEOPLE answered "The author is right. Children are boring, especially mine!"

To you four people, can I have your kids?

Sorry - completely disagree. My kids are amazing and I LOVE summer when they are around all the time. I HATE IT when school starts back up again.

Besides David, my kids are the best thing that ever happened to me... 2 girls: ages 14 and 11.

Jen

I don't have kids, but I've always found this idea very intriguing:

"Those of us who are not thoroughly 'child-centric', meaning we don't put our children's guitar practice before our own ambitions, are made to feel guilty. We're not meant to have an adult life — at least, not one that doesn't include them."

It seems a bit unrealistic to stop having things that you like to do and are interested in because you have a child. That said, I've been berated by those with kids before for even asking that question. Sorry. I just really can't understand that part of it.

do you take teenagers?

Ummm....ok, let me rephrase that - can I have your kids UNDER THE AGE OF 10.

I love my girls. They are amazing and truely a gift. Yes they get on my nerves sometimes but doesn't everybody at some point in time. My girls are 9 and 5.

They may get bored but they are never boring to me.

Dammit...I only have one left under 10 and I aint quite bored of him yet

I didn't vote cuz I have no kids, but I don't think they're boring. Some are annoying but not boring

I dont think kids are boring at all. I will also say that my parents dont think so either since they adopted 4 kids.

I don't have my own kids but take care of everyone elses kids from ages infant to 13 years old.
Here's my take on ages and stages.
Infant- not boring, need constant attention, and want to watch them when they are sleeping
Toddler- not boring need high speed energy to keep them out of trouble and comfortable
Preschool- still not boring, loves to learn and play games
K-2 grade- still not boring, still loves to learn, explore and play
3-5 grade- still not boring can get them outside to play ball, and bounce around with them
6th grade-up- Bored of you would rather be doing what they want you might as well be typing on visa journey which I do alot when I hang with the 12 year old going on 45.
Only time they are not bored with you is when she wants to go to the mall or get a ride somewhere.

moondancer

I'm with you too

i wonder if the 4 who voted that their children are boring ... if their children died tomr if it would just roll off their back because .... eh, they were boring anyway!

too bad people don't appreciate what they have ... if your children are boring ... it's because of YOU!

I don't have children either, but I sense that lots of people feel that way before they have children, but then once they do they're dying to do things for/with the kids.

Personally, I've never been too interested in children; I want to have my own some day, but I have no desire to like... work with or spend time with other people's kids. When all the other little girls in my grammar school wanted to be nurses and teachers and hold babies and play with kids all day long, *I* wanted to be a veterinarian lol.

i don't think kids are boring at all! at least not any i've ever met or babysat.
i think certain things can be boring, like long recitals and prize-giving and sports meets and stuff. not because of the child, more because you have to sit through watching dozens of other kids when you only really only wanna see the one you're rooting for.
its funny that the person in the article is whining so much... when the kids finally get married and move out, they will long for those "boring" moments.

My daughter is amazing. Very inquisitive and loves to be on the go all the time. I don't get bored with her, it's more that she gets bored with us, since we don't have the energy level she does Kids boring?? Nah, they're only boring to those who are more interested in themselves than in anyone else.

Yes, sometimes kids are boring, but then so are a lot of adults.

Sometimes it's tedious to sit and play pokemon cards with my son, but then there are some very fun moments we have together too.

I'll tell you what really stuck a chord with me in that article though: the play groups, where the infants and toddlers roll around and the mothers sit around and talk about teething and potty training. Yes, I can have a conversation with someone about that, but I'm pretty good at only making it last a couple of minutes. Then, I want to move on. When the only thing you have on common with those other women are mother issues, you tend to sit there and watch the clock or drag your kids away early. Becuase I'll be honest: the most boring thing about those playgroups isn't the kids; it's the adults.

Boys are never boring! That is unless they make you look at baseball cards for hours or tell you the same joke over and over and over and over.

Kids are amazing. But every little thing they do ain't.......heck, crawling, walking, talking and all that jazz is just nature.

Then later on, you help them try to find their gifts. It isn't always pretty. Example, Music recitals can be amazing and require earplugs at the same time.

Face it - some of what you do for your kids is just plain old momma's love.

It's really just like any other relationship. Except it's with a little person.

What's with the whole not taking her kids to the park thing? That's crazy.
I think kids are stressful, but not boring. That is why I don't have any (yet). I'm waiting til I don't see children as a death sentence. Sounds like the author never got that point. Maybe she shouldn't have had any?

What a spoiled BRAT! I feel so sorry for her children. Being a parent and a wife is a full-time job but her problem is that it's not about 'me, me, me, me, me' and shes' too darned selfish to do it. People who don't want to be parents shouldn't have kids in the first place.

i've wanted to have children for so long now...i can't imagine that i'd ever be bored again!

Kids boring? Nooo. Hilarious? Yes! I guess it's all in perspective. If you just focus on the child rather than the rather blah activity it's so much more entertaining. I'm absolutely bored to tears by certain board games, but the conversations I have with my kids while playing them make the games entertaining.

i love my kids... they are young only once.. i try to relate to them by thinking back when i was a kid...it helps when they want you to spend 2 hours with them playing barbies hahahahha

post boosting

I chose the last selection !




She's the boring one,not the kids.

Kids suck, but parents who think kids are "amazing!" and "a gift!" are even worse. I mean...really. Any Badger can spawn. It isn't anything special to pop out a kid and then raise it for 18 years. Happens all the time. Why is YOUR child so "Amazing"? People who have kids and worship them as marvels of creation are also some of the most sanctimonious and boring people I've ever met. They look down upon those who either don't have kids, don't want kids, or can't stand the little buggers. They hardly ever do ANYthing.
"Wanna go riding after work today Tom?"
"I can't...Martha just called and said the baby puked up a perfect bust of Elvis on my chair. So, I gotta rush home after work and take pictures of it so I can show them to EVERYone in the office tomorrow!"

Kid-People suck.

My kids are grown, i wouldnt have changed having them BUT 4 ballgames at one time at different locations, one the wouldnt get out of the bed to puke when sick, one wet the bed little longer than most etc etc. THen they age and now they know everything, then they marry and now are getting their payback (and i love it)