An article by guest author Joanna Cake 

Nearly thirteen years ago, when A moved from her carry cot into a proper cot, we bought her a special organic coconut mattress to sleep on, rather than one of the plasticky common or garden variety.  When T was born, A moved into a lovely new single bed, her old cot mattress was discarded and a similar expensive new coconut mattress was purchased for the new baby.

At 11 weeks, we were preparing to move T from his carrycot in our bedroom and into his new cot in his own bedroom when a news article on the radio caught my attention.  Apparently, there were fears about the safety of a chemical used to, I think, waterproof cot mattresses and it was being linked to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome  or cot death as we knew it then.  The famous and respected journalist, Roger Cook, had done a programme about it which would be shown the following evening.

As the day wore on, more and more stations were covering the story and it was a major item on both the BBC and ITV news at 6 and again at 9 and 10.  The newspapers the following morning were full of it.  Each article more scary than its predecessor until, by the time the programme was shown, the beleaguered parents of the UK were beside themselves with terror.  The programme itself had some shocking tales and statistics that seemed to categorically link incidents of cot death with the presence of the suspicious chemical in both new and previously-used mattresses.  It did not however specifically mention the special coconut version that we had purchased.  All varieties were being tarred with the same brush.  There was no distinction qualifying which brands contained the chemical and which did not.  Cot mattresses were dangerous! Full stop. 

Running around like a headless chicken, I was beside myself.  I just didn’t know what to do for the best.  There was my beautiful baby boy.  There was his lovely new cot in his nice new room.  But I couldn’t put the two of them together without the terrible fear that I might be signing his death warrant.

In the end, we decided that T would sleep with me in the double bed in his room until such time as we could get further clarification regarding safety.  The whole scandal rumbled on for several months… before it was replaced with something else and parents were left in this terrible place with fear but no proper facts.  Eventually, we moved T into the cot anyway but, of course, the damage of allowing him to go to sleep in the same bed as a parent was already done.  He had got used to dozing off with a warm, comforting presence and, deprived of it, he would cry heartrendingly.  It was not until he was three years old that I managed to get him to sleep through the night.  Yes, I tried letting him cry and going in at regular intervals to reassure but not to pick up.  He would cry and cry and eventually my husband would barge past me standing outside the door and pick him up, undoing any good that I had achieved.  When T was three, my husband had to go into hospital for a few days and in that time, I went back to the crying and reassuring.  One night he cried for three hours but, although I stayed outside the door, I would not pick him up.  The following night, he cried for two hours, and the next night for one.  By the time my husband returned, he understood that crying was not going to make me pick him up and he started sleeping - not right through the night but at least for reasonable chunks of it.

I’m sure that investigative journalists make these assertions with all the right motives, but once the sensation has reached its zenith, they move onto the next story leaving us to try to deal with all the problems they have stirred up.  And you cannot help but be left with the feeling that they have preyed shamelessly on our insecurities as parents, as other journalists jump onto the bandwagon and each subsequent report cranks up the pressure of our hysteria until we just don’t know what to believe or do for the best.

This is an example of media meddling that directly affected me but I will address others that have had a huge impact on all parents in a couple of weeks.

 An article by guest writer Joanna Cake 

 Following last night’s Panorama about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, I was reminded of an article written by Janice Turner of The Times back in September when Kate McCann first came into the spotlight as a suspect in the case.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/janice_turner/article2456672.ece

I read this article with a growing sense of agreement but also a vague feeling of distaste. As a mother myself, I can understand Janice Turner’s point of view. I am so tired of being made to feel afraid for my children’s safety by the relentless press coverage of the terrible tragedies that have occurred over the past few years.

When that terrible man wreaked his havoc with guns blazing in the classroom at Dunblane, my own daughter had just started school. I can remember going into the playground on that awful afternoon. You could have cut the fear in the atmosphere with a knife. We were all terrified by proxy.

Again, when Holly and Jessica went missing in the summer holidays, my daughter was the same age. It was incredibly hard having to explain to her that she couldn’t trust anyone - not even the school caretaker. The hideous blanket press coverage of the disappearance, the search and the discovery and, finally, the trial and conviction, with all its consequent revelations. Followed by all the months and years of arguing over the correct legislation to protect our children from people with similar tendencies.

The case of Sarah Payne, snatched whilst playing with her friends in a field not far from her home highlighted every parent’s worst nightmare. It is so hard to convince a child that they are not invincible and would not be able to fight off a grown man, even if they have done some martial arts training. I even did demonstrations for my own kids and the children I teach showing that a normal sized man could pick me up under his arm and run off with me without any difficulty, no matter how hard I punched and kicked. Once he’d grabbed me, he had the upper hand. We repeatedly demonstrated how to maintain a safe distance from someone who was trying to engage us in conversation and how to ‘leave the scene quickly and safely to go meet a male family member’. But a week later, the kids would still allow themselves to be approached sufficiently close to be snatched and dragged away.

When Madeleine first disappeared, I have to admit that my first thought was ‘But why was she left on her own with two babies? She was only three.’ As parents, my Husband and I went on holiday to be with our children. We specifically targeted hotels that would allow us to eat with our children at a reasonable hour for them. Where this proved impossible and dinner was served just too late for them, we would sit with them whilst they had the kids’ tea and then spend the evening sitting in our adjoining room with the door ajar, watching tv and eating whatever was available from room service. Some hotels were good enough to let us order from the restaurant menu and bring it up to our room. Despite people’s insistence that we should use the hotel babysitting service, we never left them on their own, even when the oldest was three times as old as Madeline. We had seen how the intercom-based hotel babysitter worked and if no-one was sitting at Reception, no-one was listening to what our kids were doing.

However, I can’t help but feel sorry for the McCanns. They will have to live with the consequences of their action and the public’s admonishment for the rest of their lives. As parents, many of us do things that are viewed as ‘taking a chance with their safety’ that in another age would have been seen as the norm when children had to learn to survive and be independent and fend for themselves in far more dangerous circumstances.

Sadly, in the absence of any real evidence or obvious suspect, the finger of suspicion was always eventually going to point in the direction of the parents - even with the recent revelation that one of the ‘Tapas 9′ diners actually saw a man carrying a female child away from the flat. It seems strange to me, as a regular viewer of CSI, that it is so far down the line that forensic evidence has been brought into play and we will have to await the results of that line of investigation and the possible refuting evidence before that can be relied upon.

Always at the back of my mind is the face of another little boy who disappeared back in the early 1990s. I remember his story well because it was such an unusual thing to happen and his photographs showed such a cute little boy. Three year old Ben Needham was on holiday with his family in Greece when he vanished. Despite a big campaign, he was never found.

As Janice Turner says in her final paragraph:

Given that Madeleine has almost certainly died one way or another, maybe it is easier to accept a parental accident. Yes, let it be a banal domestic: we can guard against that, or so we think. Anything but the cunning, predatory stranger we watch for constantly but can never see.

written by guest author Joanna Cake

Getting on for ten years ago, the kids were eating breakfast in the dining room, prior to school, and I was emptying the dishwasher in the kitchen when I caught the tail end of a piece on the radio. Could I possibly have heard it correctly? Were they really announcing that Stephen Gateley had come out? Stephen Gateley, the love of my eight-year-old daughter’s life, was publicly admitting that he was gay.

The walls of her room were covered in Boyzone posters but Stephen was her favourite. If she found out Boyzone were performing on any of the kids’ music shows, she would be watching, avidly drinking in his every move. She was going to be very upset because people would be saying things about Stephen that were obviously not very nice but that she didn’t understand.

But I didn’t have time to consider all the ramifications and repercussions of this News right then. It was gone 8.35 and time for the daily ritual of shouting and running around after them like a sheepdog to ensure that everything that should be in their schoolbags was! I don’t know how many times we had left the house and got halfway to school only to discover that one of the lunches that I had put by the front door so they wouldn’t forget to pack them into their rucksacks had remained in situ.

We walked the mile to school every day, much to my children’s chagrin. How often had I heard them whinge: ‘Why can’t we go by car like everyone else?’, especially on days when the heavens were throwing stair rods as well as cats and dogs at us. But parking at our school was a nightmare and I am one of those mums with a massive 4×4. If I’m honest, it wouldn’t have made any difference if Id had a mini, I couldn’t park one of those either!

I have always loved to walk. The pregnancy pounds fell off me as a result of the four miles a day I walked with my son in the pram, taking my daughter to and from school. When he went to nursery school, this became six miles a day and I relished it. There was never a need to go to keepfit classes because I had my aerobic exercise every day and it gave me so much time to think. And my children were also fit and healthy as a result of this daily exercise.

On this particular morning, having dropped them off just about on time, I had plenty to think about. How on earth was I going to deal with this one? I knew I had just a few hours to come up with a suitable explanation because there was no doubt in my mind that my daughter would be advised of the Stephen Gateley news virtually as soon as she set foot in the playground. Most of her friends were the oldest child in their family so would be protected from revelations like this, but there were still a fair number of classmates with older siblings who would be discussing this event. Through them, this information and a lot of misinformation would, in turn, be disseminating its way down to my daughter. I had to have some answers to counterbalance the views that would have been expressed about Stephen Gateley himself and about homosexuality in general.

It was a tricky subject. We hadn’t really even dealt with the whole birds and the bees thing in anything other than the vaguest terms. I always believed, when they were that age, that you should tell them about controversial stuff when they ask or when it becomes apparent from their conversation that they are about to ask and in terms that they can relate to - not necessarily chapter and verse which they won’t understand. I can remember my own mother telling me the full facts at about my daughter’s age and having this picture in my head that they would lie next to each other in bed and my father’s willy would somehow stretch like a hosepipe around to go inside my mother whilst she was asleep! And, some time later, a baby would fall out of her.

Now, they are into their teenage years, I still use that basic rule but, as my son gets older and is a little less direct about such matters than my daughter, I also throw out things that I think he should know about but I try to do it in a way that shows that sex is a perfectly natural function that it is ok to ask questions about. My golden rule has always been to never be embarrassed or nonplussed and always give an honest answer. So, we don’t sit down and discuss sex per se but if something comes up in a conversation when we’re out in the car or watching something on the TV, then we talk about it as it comes up.

Still, how to deal with ‘gayness’ when straightness hasn’t even been part of a conversation?

When I picked A up that afternoon, at first she said nothing. But, after we had got home and had a drink and a biscuit, she cornered me in the kitchen. ‘Mum, ** says that Stephen is gay. What exactly does that mean?’ To be honest, I couldn’t have asked for a better question. If she had been on the receiving end of any misinformation, she was discounting it with a view to getting the full facts from me.

‘Well, honey. Basically, it means that Stephen prefers to be with other boys, rather than girls. It doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with him or that you should stop liking him. But you do need to understand that, no matter how much you like him, he is never going to want to marry you or any other girl.’

Just that basic information seemed to be enough for her mind at that time. Later, she had her talk in y10 about the differences physically between boys and girls and about menstruating and the like but there was never any discussion about hetero- or homo-sexuality at that stage. They seemed to become aware in about y11 that being gay meant you liked having ’sex’ with people of the same gender but again their understanding of specifics was very vague.

It was several years later when my son started in y8 and I asked him what they had talked about in their PHSE lesson that I found out how they learned about being gay in terms of sexuality. He told me that they had been discussing condoms and ’same sex sex’. ‘But, mum,’ he asked. ‘How does that work?’ After establishing that he was clear what sex between a man and a woman entailed, I answered his question. His face when I told him it involved penises and bottoms was a picture. ‘Well, I’m certainly never doing that!’ he announced emphatically.

I did take the opportunity to talk about condoms and learning how to put them on and also to reassure him that he could ask me absolutely anything and I would answer his questions as best I could. I went on to say that he could also tell me anything and I would never be judgemental because he would always be my little boy that I loved very much. Even if, at some point in the future, he did decide that he wanted to have ’same sex sex’. ‘You think I’m gay?’ ‘Well, no, I’m just saying that you can tell me anything.’ ‘I’m not gay, I’m not!’

I’m not sure whether I handled that bit quite as well as I might…