Let’s make a tribe like mothers and fathers, what do we need

Hello! This week I address myself to you, reader and reader. On Thursday, April 28, we open the doors of the Education and Upbringing Club of EL PERIÓDICO. Do you want to come? You just have to register here. It will be in the afternoon (6:30 p.m.) at the Abacus bookstore (Còrsega, 269). Come on! We will talk about childhood, upbringing, motherhood, fatherhood… We can chat about what you want, what you like and what worries you. I really want to meet you, I’m sure we have a lot of things in common.

We’ll be in a bookstore, so we’ll talk about books, of course. of the last of Aroa Moreno, for example, ‘La Bajamar’, a wonderful drawing of motherhood, family secrets, fears and guilt. Oh, the guilt, the one that convinces us that we do everything wrong as mothers because the responsibility suffocates us. Also from ‘We can only hope for the best,’ where the Swedish author Caroline Setterwall She takes our breath away as she reveals her postpartum depression and how her husband died suddenly in his sleep. We will talk about series. From ‘Perfect Life’, where Leticia Dolera gives life to a mother drowning in guilt because she doesn’t love her baby, and ‘La assistant’, where the protagonist lives for her daughter, an enviable being of light.

We will talk about hyper-paternity, the phenomenon that the journalist, author and disseminator Eva Millet has told us about so many times and that is doing us and our children so much harm. We will talk about how instead of forming a tribe, fathers and mothers dedicate ourselves to criticizing ourselves and judging those who do not raise like us. Why are we like this?

We’ll talk about how to survive school chat and what to do in case of fire. We will talk about how conciliation does not exist. The conciliation are the grandmothers and the network of mothers of the schoolthose that save your life when you don’t get to pick up your child.

The birth rate it is a matter of state. Longevity added to the low birth rate is a mathematical formula that, in 2050, will give the following result: Spain will be, together with Japan, the oldest country in the world. In a country where only 18.5% of people between the ages of 16 and 29 are emancipated, where renting a flat alone means that young people spend 94% of their net salary, where the average age to have a child is over 30 (what experts call late fertility), where there is hardly any support for child-rearing because children are considered something private, where motherhood puts a stop to work careers and where men have not assumed co-responsibility for care, the true Question It’s not why we don’t have kids but why we do.

We will talk about care, a value that is not exactly on the rise, as Diana Oliver reminds us in ‘Precarious Maternities’. The day that taking care of your child is considered as important and productive as working in an office, we will have gained a lot as a society.

We will talk about real motherhood, not gossip magazines. But we are not going to get intense. We will do it with humour, like Martín Piñol, because de-dramatizing is vital. We can talk (and laugh) about the nonsense that we have all been told during pregnancy: what if the crochet octopuses, the amber necklaces, the angel caller, the emotional ultrasounds and the stimulation with music. We just need, as my partner would say Valentina Raffioeditor of this journal specializing in science, the Tibetan bowls to finish celebrating the festival of pseudotherapies.

If your children are not small but feared teenagers, also come to the chat. We’ll talk about how their brain generates oxytocin (the happiness hormone) when they’re with their friends and not with you, so don’t take it badly from you.

If we are bored talking about our children we can always do it in the kitchen. With the permission of our specialist and person in charge of Tasting, Pau Arenós, of course. We can talk about the sugar epidemic that invades the lives of our children, we can (and should) mention the dietitian-nutritionist Julio Basulto and clarify whether the vegetarian diet in childhood is healthy (‘spoiler’, it is) and we can exchange recipes chocolate biscuits with chickpeas by the cook and promoter Juan Llorca. Although Holy Week has passed, we can talk about baked toast instead of fried (another ‘spolier’, the difference is not noticeable).

I hope I have convinced you. I hope to see you. Thanks for coming.