Why I stopped trying to be the perfect father – and how I made my peace with being a terrible one

I am a terrible dad. This isn’t one of those false modesty pieces where you actually learn that I’m the best loving dad in the world but with a charming middle-class confidence problem.

No, I mean it. I’m a lousy dad.

If you visited and observed our family farm, in Matterdale in the Lake District, you’d perhaps be kind and say I was quite a good father. When our youngest, Tom, aged three, shouts loudly, ‘I need a poo,’ I jump up and try and get him to the toilet to get that done on target.

I try to take him with me to feed the sheep as often as I can, so his mother doesn’t actually have a full nervous breakdown from his tantrums. He has a minor anger management issue, but we talk him down and try to explain that he can’t growl like a rabid wolf when he doesn’t get his own way.

I read to him every night in bed or show him dinosaur clips on YouTube, and I tuck him in and tell him I love him. Last night he asked when his sheep would have her lambs, and when I told him “soon”, he said I could do the slimy work, he would just cuddle them when they were dry.

Our oldest boy, Isaac, aged nine, is an easier child to parent. I recently bought him a bike, because he was feeling embarrassed about his biking skills. He hasn’t spent much time on a bike like his friends (we live on a hill with a rough potholed lane, so it isn’t ideal for learning).

At the bike store, we ignored his mother’s financial prudence and chose a snazzy one. I ran alongside him on a quiet road to build his confidence on the roads. Then bit my tongue, and hid my wounds, when he said he hated biking and refused to ride it any more. I ruffled his hair and took him to see the toads mating on our pond instead. He liked that.

Last night I ate my youngest daughter’s (Bea, 13) first cooked meal - beef teriyaki and sticky rice, with stir-fried vegetables. The bought sauce was horrid, the rice was cold and the vegetables were greasy. I ate more than anyone else and tried to encourage her when she said she hated it.

I am helping her to train her sheepdog, Tosh. She would make a brilliant farmer, but says she has other plans that she can’t tell us about yet. The intrigue is killing me.

Our eldest, Molly, aged 15, helped me do some gardening today, and chatted to me about season 8 of Game of Thrones, after about a year of her seemingly hating the very sight of me.

We’ve had two family holidays on which she barely spoke to me and thank goodness children’s services weren’t there when we had a furious row on the roadside in Northumberland two years ago.

She has been distancing herself to find her own way, and I respect that. I’ve settled for her not helping me, or her mum, very much and always having a fairly comprehensive legal argument for doing exactly what she pleases.

She looks after her pony in the barn well, has a part-time job at a horse racing yard, and works hard at school. I’m not at all worried about her, because she’s already a kick-ass individual.

So, as you can see, I do ‘good dad’ stuff. But none of this really matters, and it is only recently that I’ve come to realise why.

Until about a year ago I was trying, like lots of modern parents to be the perfect dad. This meant trying hard to beat my own dad’s efforts – to be less erratic and have fewer irrational moments, to provide a bit more financial security, a nicer car, foreign holidays, to make some dutiful appearances at parents’ evenings, to make regular declarations of love and dispense an embarrassing number of cuddles.

The problem is that parenting is like warfare, everything we know about it is based on the last go we had at it, but all we learn from looking backwards to the previous generation’s mistakes is how to make new ones. So it came as a bit of a kick in the teeth to be told I wasn’t that great a parent by my eldest.

By trying to be a successful dad, I’ve committed a heinous parenting crime – one I didn’t know existed until it was too late. I was so busy trying to be admired by my kids that I made myself a new kind of wrong.

Yes, I wrote two bestselling and critically acclaimed books (The Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral) that have somehow gone around the world in translation and, yes, I do have a bunch of followers on social media. But so what if you’re 15 and I’m your dad.

My daughters have to study my books in English in some fantasy literary punch-up that the teachers have created between me and George Monbiot about the fate of the Lake District. I can’t imagine my eldest ever reading another word by either George or myself.

She told me politely that she won’t ever be reading anything I write and, in an act of rebellion that I can’t help admiring, she has decided to read better books than I’m capable of writing. She is working through the classics.

My wife says that my job is to shut up and let our daughter carry on this very civilised rebellion against me for as long as possible.

My dad at least had the dignity to be a complete nobody, no one ever talked about him at school. That’s the thing with parenting, your own efforts and accomplishments are really just the raw material for your children’s angst - they f--- you up, your mum and dad.

That’s our assigned role in their life movies. It doesn’t matter how good the life you gave them. It doesn’t matter how hard you tried, how much you’ve achieved, how great the sacrifices. That’s your story, your own heroic self-narrative. But in the movie of their life, it’s essential to remember that you are not the star. As a father you are meant to be the flawed loser in the opening chapters of their memoirs – an appropriate target to hit out at and move beyond. Our flaws are the fault lines in their childhoods.

And I have an abundance of flaws. I don’t know a damn thing about what it’s like to be 15 in a global pandemic when the school system shuts down. I haven’t a clue how to do home schooling.

My own schooling was full of gaps, so I can’t help my kids with their maths or science homework when they get past eight or nine years old – ‘I’ll google it’ soon wears thin. I am a farmer so rarely have the time to do it anyway, so yes, you’ve guessed it, that responsibility falls on my wife.

I don’t know what it’s like to be a kid in an age of social media. I am as confused by contemporary sexuality and gender discussions as anyone alive. I tend to shrug and retreat to platitudes about kindness and tolerance.

My wife, who listens to more podcasts and reads more parenting books than me, tells me there is psychology to all this – the best we can do is to be ‘present’ and to be there calmly to ‘repair’ after a ‘rupture’. This sounds to me suspiciously like the stuff Barbara Streisand might say in Meet the Fockers, but I have a feeling my wife is right.

Becoming a father is basically impossible; it’s a rigged game, your kids are programmed to resent you no matter how much you strive to give them everything that you never had. In the past year or two I’ve stopped trying to be that great dad, stopped trying to persuade my kids they got lucky by having me as their father. I’ve decided to settle for a more modest role in their movie, instead of thinking they are simply charming extras in mine. I’ve reached a kind of peace about it all. It will be what it is. I’ll love you no matter what.

I console myself with a simple thought – that they probably won’t respect my parenting efforts until life has crushed them with their own whining children, boring jobs, hefty mortgage, dull friends, imperfect partners and failed dreams. It is only then when they have failed themselves and have shadows of defeat under their eyes and spare chins, that they will perhaps look back and think ‘Dad was great, wasn’t he? Shame we killed him’.

English Pastoral: An Inheritance by James Rebanks (Allen Lane) is out now in hardback, and available in paperback from September 2