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How to make sure you are your kids' favourite parent

IT’S your duty to bring your children up well, but it’s more important to make them love you more than your partner. Here’s how to make sure you’re number one.

Never say ‘no’

Boundaries are essential, but why should you have to be the killjoy who enforces them? Allow your kids to behave how the hell they like: watch 45 consecutive episodes of Hey Duggee, use their shoes as a weapon to clobber other kids over the head, etc. Your partner will be forced to step in and say ‘no’ and BOOM! Who’s the most beloved parent now?!

Avoid the tricky stuff

Come across as the fun-loving parent by slipping away whenever there’s a challenging moment in your child’s routine. Yet again you’ve got an important call/terrible headache/chronic fatigue when it’s time to order them to put on their shoes, eat their peas, have a bath, brush their teeth or go to bed. Fail as a parent and never be the bad guy!

Sweets, sweets, sweets

If there’s one thing children will do anything for, it’s sugar. They may start on fresh fruit but by the time they’re toddlers they’ll be begging like junkies for the hard stuff: sweets, cakes, M&S biscuits that are almost 100% chocolate. If you want to motivate them to do anything — from homework to loving you the most — sweets are the currency you’ll need.

Sacrifice your phone to them

If you can handle the sticky fingerprints and the odd accidental call to your ex-boyfriend, then letting your child loose with your phone will be rewarded with adoration. Obviously there will be disturbing things online that children shouldn’t see. Those will be their favourites, so let them fill their boots. You’ll treasure seeing their little faces light up over YouTube videos of bloody shark attacks and fatal car crashes.

Be absent

A reliable way to avoid losing your shit with your children and mentally scarring them is to not be there. And it’s going to happen – they’re too annoying for it not to. Also by not being around you retain an aura of mystique. A few ‘deadbeat dad’ parenting techniques will make partners of both sexes way more popular because you’re not doing annoying things like stopping their teeth falling out.

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Massive deprivation and millions falling into poverty I can live with, but the price of petrol is beyond a joke

By Francesca Johnson

PAYING £100 to fill up your car should be a wake-up call to politicians. You’re alienating key voters like me who don’t give a shit about hardship so long as it happens to other people.

The bleeding hearts keep banging on about families who can’t afford to turn the oven on. But who’s highlighting the sad look on my face when I’m filling up my Range Rover? I need that car to get to aerobics and the Sainsbury’s in easy walking distance.

All these money-saving tips are patronising rubbish. How am I meant to use less petrol? I can’t go to work on public transport because it’s full of muggers and dirty people. I feel itchy just thinking about them.

Apparently poor children are crying because they’re hungry at school. You think that’s bad, kiddoes? When I’m paying for petrol I feel like crying too. Crying for all the white wine and garden furniture I could have spent it on.

It’s time for the government to act. I’d like to see an emergency payment to cope with the immediate crisis, say £800 for a Volkswagen Polo, going up to £2,500 for a Range Rover Evoque. These things guzzle petrol, even if you’re nipping to the supermarket for just one onion.

In the longer term there should be a windfall tax on the poor. Many of them don’t have the expense of running a car, so it’s only fair some of their benefits should go to me.

Without this sort of decisive action I’m sorry Boris, or possibly Keir, you’ve lost my vote. Utterly selfish people like me deserve help. You don’t find us demanding better trains or hospitals. I haven’t got cancer, so I literally don’t see the point of cancer treatment.  

So let’s ignore these people being made homeless and help the forgotten victims of petrol price rises – people like me and my family. Or, if push comes to shove, just me.

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