Are Children Evil?

You might think this a slightly unfair, perhaps even nasty question to be posing, especially seeing as I'm a father, but then you weren't in my house at 4 o'clock this morning.

Children - more specifically, babies, I suppose - are masters of cunning. For the first three months or so, they are small, screaming people. They scream pretty much indiscriminately at day or night. The rules state (at least, in all the books I've read) that there can be several reasons for babies crying. The baby can be hungry, tired, have a wet or dirty nappy, or be (wait for it) bored (if that's a reason to cry, I'm amazed I don't scream my way through more meetings). Apparently, if you gradually eliminate all the possible causes, you'll hit upon the right one and shut the baby up. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah, funny.

After the initial three months of this, they then lull you entirely into a false sense of security. They start sleeping through the night. "Well, I don't know what all the fuss is about", you loudly declare to anyone who happens to walk past you, "This baby sleeping business is easy!". Other parents throw you unpleasant looks of scorn. You don't realise that these are because your sound sleeping won't last.

Lucy, my daughter, is now nearly 14 months old. I love her to bits. There's nothing I wouldn't do for her. But, sadly, all rational thought leaves my brain, when forced to deal with her random, reason-less, restless screams, of the type that she is currently torturing myself and my wife with. All I want to do is get her to go to sleep. Doing that requires you to be loving and soothing, at just the moment you want to (and often do, frankly, if you're me) scream at her to shut up.

Children aren't really evil, of course. Well, except that kid who used to do that Frosties advert ("They're gonna taste great") - I'm fairly sure he's hiding a red pitchfork somewhere. There could be any number of reasons that Lucy's not sleeping at the moment. She could be teething, she could be too hot with the unseasonable heat we are experiencing, or any number of things.

They worst thing that it's quite hard to think straight or concentrate when you're so tired during the day. You end up making either slightly irrational decisions, or not being much good at all. They say that Margaret Thatcher survived on four hours of sleep a night. I guess that explains a lot...