Parental pride comes before a fall

The pride a parent feels toward their child is a strange and potentially perilous thing. It can be blind, as when a tone-deaf mother genuinely believes her tone-deaf son is the greatest singer since Pavarotti, and is aggrieved when even Louis Walsh winces and says: “you remind me of a young Orville the Duck”.

It can also be a proxy for parental regret, such as in the case of the football dad who puts little Johnny’s MVP runner-up certificate in the centre of the mantelpiece to make up for his own trophyless football career.

There can sometimes be a mismatch between a parent’s pride and their child’s own sense of fulfilment. When my daughter was seven, she took part in a music recital with all the other kids who had been taking guitar lessons. She was proud because she thought she’d done a good job. We were less convinced by the playing, but will remain forever gratified that instead of strumming “Three Blind Mice” or another well-known nursery rhyme, she played “Martha the Last Passenger Pigeon”, which was truthfully, if rather grandly described as her “own composition”. As a tune it was indiscernible; as an exercise in chutzpah, it was remarkable.

Sometimes, however, the pride stars align. My daughter has thankfully moved on from the guitar (as well as from her unusual interest in extinct bird species), and now at secondary school has taken safer refuge in the choir. They practice weekly, putting on two concerts a year for those parents willing to subject themselves to ABBA medleys and trumpet interludes from the sixth form jazz ensemble.

The choir’s Christmas gig is nearly upon us, with the music apparently a little more highbrow this time. But more thrillingly, my daughter has been asked to do a reading of The Night Before Christmas, that 19th century American poem which has had so much influence over our subsequent ideas of Santa and his reindeer cronies.

When she came home and told us that she had been invited to do it, we could tell she was tickled pink, especially since she had apparently been recommended by her drama teacher. I was perhaps even prouder, and have had to restrain myself from offering to advise her on diction, volume and dramatic voice in the build up to her big moment.

In part, my feelings are as they are because I enjoy public speaking, and always have done. I liked reading Shakespeare plays at school, and Bible lessons at Church services. I enjoyed giving lectures on media ethics to journalists, and pep talks to cricket teams I was captaining. No doubt I like the sound of my own voice, but also the sense of control: a set script; no interruptions.

My pride in my daughter may therefore be an exercise in egotism: I am pleased because it makes me feel she is a chip off the old block, and that I have bestowed a genetic gift. What a tragic man!

Just as cringily, my feelings may be the result of classic middle-class prejudice in favour of success in the “right” sort of endeavour. Sure, I’d be a bit proud if my daughter was a child prodigy in computer programming, but talk about nerdtastic. And yes, good for her if she developed a talent for go-kart racing, but it’s rather gauche.

Excellence in public speaking is rather more recherche; the kind of thing you might expect from a future politician or leader of the arts – or, at the very least, from someone who will go on to be capable of blagging their way into rarefied company.

Of course, the worry with all this is that pride tends to come before a fall. My guess is that it will not be my daughter who stumbles over Dasher, Dancer, Prancer and the rest. But when her father next stands at a lectern to deliver some words from an Old Testament prophet, or to run through a slide deck in a seminar, a stutter or a brain freeze may well ruin the flow. And it’ll be my just deserts.