The month of September means different things for different people.
If you’re under the age of sixteen, it’s usually a month of mourning. Those long hot summer days of bike riding, beach fun and extended curfews suddenly come to a painful end as a new school year wraps its tentacles around your wrists and ankles. Gone are the long summer evenings spent in the park and the lazy extended lie-ins where every day is a Sunday.
If you’re a parent, your reaction is the ying to your child’s yang. While they sulk and moan, you’re jubilant. Finally, no more stressful child-care negotiations! No more careful sidestepping of parental politics as little Johnny’s mother takes great pains to keep track of how many times she’s looked after your child compared to the number of times you’ve taken little Johnny off her hands! The world can finally return to normal. Peace reigns.
However, before the calm must come the storm. By mid July Tescos are advertising their Back to School range. John Lewis has run out of school shoes and the only pencil case in WHSmith is ‘so not cool.’ You naively thought it was only a pencil case. In fact it’s a ticket straight to the bottom of the playground’s social hierarchy if you get it wrong.
If you’re anything like my mum was, it’s not until the penultimate day of the school holidays when you finally feel you have the strength to do the ‘back to school’ shop, and that’s only because you know you can’t put it off any longer. When I was a child, my mother would carefully scrutinise all of last year’s equipment deciding what would need replacing and what could survive another September. I was obviously of the understanding that everything needed replacing. How could I, in all seriousness, turn up to school with the same backpack as last year? And my favourite line? “Mum, everyone else will have a new one.” My mum wasn’t a big fan of this friend called Everyone Else.
Eventually we would leave to brace the town centre. The penultimate day of any holiday is a Saturday, which is scientifically proven to be the worst day for school shopping. Dad would have retreated long before we left the house to the safety of ‘anywhere else but here’ and it would be mum and I setting out together with our very own clear, and very different agendas regarding what we were going to come home with. We would both return exhausted; some battles she would have won, some she would have lost but I would finally be ready for the first day back, and usually with a new back-pack as a trade off for the shoes with a heel that I couldn’t have.
School shopping is the Roman equivalent of the coliseum for parents and children. As you traipse from shoe shop to bag shop to stationers to sports shop, there are fallen parents all around. You carefully step over them, realising with impending doom that your fight is still to come. You start to save strength, become defensive and soon enough, usually around the school shoe area, the fight erupts. Other parents and children stop to watch your fallout – school shopping is most certainly a spectator’s sport - and before you know it, it’s a gladiatorial bloodbath.
The children stop and stare, silently rooting for the little girl who’s desperate for the school shoes that are actually trainers. Every parent has the same, valid argument: “But the school letter said very clearly that you weren’t allowed to wear trainers.” Every child responds in the same way: “Mum, they just write that. No one ever tells you off and anyway, Everyone Else wears these exact ones.” It’s funny how Everyone Else seems to be every child’s best friend. You quickly realise that this is not the time to try and start lecturing your child on the benefits of being an individual. Individual is a very dirty word at that age.
And perhaps this is where the heart of the school shopping tension lies. Perhaps, as adults, we underestimate the impact that these things can have. I am by no means condoning giving in to every child’s back-to-school whims and demands, but maybe they’re trying to tell us something, something that even they don’t fully understand and could probably not articulate. As people for whom school is a long-distant memory, are we occasionally a little dismissive of the importance of these things at that age?
Children can be cruel. Fact. I used to be a teacher and I have witnessed this cruelty first-hand. In their microcosmic environments, they fall into a social hierarchy, which appears worryingly natural. In reality, this hierarchy often has little to do with what shoes they are wearing or what bag they are carrying, but given half a chance a child will pick on anything if they want to hurt…and comments about appearances can sting at that age.
The battles children fight with us then, on the back-to-school shop, are less about how much they actually like what they want you to buy but more about how much other people will like what you buy for them to wear around. Perhaps this is their way of defending themselves in what is basically the educational equivalent of a dog-eat-dog world. And as long, as parents, we are sure we have armed them with the substance and personality to be a good person as well, is there anything actually wrong with being a teenager and wanting to fit in?
We do the same thing. If we want to look the part and have people take us seriously in a big meeting at work, what do we do? We dress for it. We put on our sharpest suit that we know we look great in. Add the perfect shoes that we spent ages trying to find and finish it off with the perfect bag/tie (delete as appropriate). Appearance in this sense isn’t superficial; it’s essential.
This is only what kids are doing they just don’t know it. They want to walk into the first day back at school feeling confident and looking the part. The only difference is, they have to get through us to do it. And, in the eyes of parents, a great suit seems more valid than choosing a great pair of Kickers, but in their world it’s the same thing.
And it is a different world. Trying to relate their experience to our own is useless. Not only do we look back on our school days with tinted glasses, schools are a different ball game. School is exhausting. The demands are enormous and the social rules endless. Kids can never fully escape school with the explosion of Facebook and Bebo. If you get anything wrong at school, you can be sure it’s all over the internet before tea-time. They walk a fine line of social acceptance that’s extremely hard to navigate. I’m not saying it’s right or fair, but it’s reality.
So perhaps the irony is that school shopping could turn out to be one of those silent gifts to parents. Children will never tell you honestly about what happens at school, but if they’re unhappy or nervous or insecure, you’ll probably be able to tell when you go school shopping. Bearing this in mind, maybe giving in on the cool bag, or the cool shoes isn’t the end of the world.
This article originally appeared in Sussex Local magazine http://www.sussexlocal.net/
