Should I have been more Ted Beckham?

Or... how my '80s childhood ruined my daughter's chances of being a millionaire

Always so on the pulse and in touch with the zeitgeist, me. That’s why this column today is about the David Beckham documentary. Did you watch it? Of course you did. Don’t get me wrong, I watched it when everyone else did, but I’m just not one of these people who can thrash out a searing hot take on The Thing That Everyone Is Talking About. Quite often the very fact that something is the only topic of conversation is the thing that really turns me off adding my noise. It’s why I only reluctantly put down some of my thoughts about the Barbie film weeks after everyone else was popping a temple vein about whether it was the reinvention of feminism or the death of it. I’ll probably let you know what I think of the Colleen Rooney documentary some time in January.  

Here’s what I didn’t expect from watching the Beckham thing: the person I still cannot stop thinking about is… Ted Beckham. 

Why are we all sleeping on the hot takes about Ted Beckham? The man has single- handedly had me questioning everything about my own parenting style. 

Sure, baby David showed glimmers of promise. But so did one of my brothers and he is now a country policeman with a trick knee. Question: How, once you’ve clocked that promise, do you nurture it, hone it and craft the person with it to become one of the most talented, most famous and wealthiest footballers in history?

Answer: You bring in a terrifyingly hard-arsed drill sergeant of a dad, like Ted Beckham. The kind of dad who makes you keep kicking that ball until you’ve actually eroded off the soles of your own feet. The dad who makes you keep practising your high kicks and ball control when you’re freezing and crying and all the other kids are warm and happy inside watching He Man and the Masters of the Universe. The kind of dad who makes you eat raw eggs washed down with Guinness for… some reason. I forget why, I was too busy dry-heaving and listening to mum Sandra saying she tried to stop Ted making David cry. But I don’t think he could hear her complaints over the crying. 

I’ve never had the grit required to be a tiger parent. Well, I say ‘parent’. It’s usually billed as the exclusive domain of pushy, pinch-faced tiger ‘mums’. But wow, our Ted has surely been exposed as a giant in the field. 

When, as a young pup, David went to live in Manchester to attend United’s training/ incubator camp, he says he’d regularly phone home, wailing about stomach pains. He laughs when he says now that he wasn’t sick, just homesick. Sandra kept asking Ted if they should at least go and see him but the reply was always a firm, unhesitating ‘No.’

I have never been able to be that kind of a nails parent. Once, when my daughter went on a two-day school trip to a place 60 miles away, she banged on the school bus windows, sobbing her heart out, begging me to bust down the doors and extract her and take her home. I didn’t. But I really wanted to, I couldn’t stand the sadness. I’m possibly more Sandra Beckham in this regard than Sandra Beckham. Add to that, my husband is no Ted. He’s slightly better at being the bad cop to my good (flaky, anything to stop the moaning and crying and shouting) cop. But not much. 

I was talking to a friend, who happens to be a highly successful image handler for many famous faces you know. ‘I thought Ted came across so badly,’ he said.   

But did he? Yes, he came across as the hard-arse competitive dad from hell. Sure. But… look at what that created! One of the greatest footballers the country’s ever produced. Incidentally, I’d never had any appreciation of that until I watched the documentary. I knew, rationally, that Beckham must be a good footballer. But I think I thought the uber fame was more a result of him being 1) extraordinarily easy on the eye and 2) married to a famous pop star. But um… he was really fucking amazing at football, wasn’t he? I don’t care about football, I’d never actually watched him play until I saw this documentary. Wow, well done Becks.

In stark contrast to the Ted Beckhams of this world, there’s the likes of me. I’m more what the writer Emma Brockes so eloquently described as a jellyfish parent. Wobbly. Malleable. Completely lacking in any semblance of spine. 

Hmmm, seeing a lot of standing, not much kicking here. Lazy little git.

As such, I let her quit piano, ballet, boogie-boarding, Saturday drama club. Also swimming, once I knew she had the basics. Unlike Ted, I think it’s fairly safe to say I didn’t miss the signs of world class genius in any of these arenas. But maybe that’s just because I’m a weak, weak parent? If I’d channelled my inner Ted Beckham, and forced her to stick with piano lessons, would she have improved and eventually, possibly, found that she did like it, and thus be inspired to improve more? The ol’ 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration’ route? But where, as a parent, do you identify that line?

In time, my daughter may decide that it is indeed all my fault that she is not now a prima ballerina or a piano virtuoso. If she ever does start ranting at me that I should have Ted Beckhamed the crap out of her, I will tell her what any level-headed mum in my shoes would: that it’s MY parents’ fault. 

I’m kidding. Mostly. But it’s true that the general vibe of 1980s parenting and schooling had me resolving to be kind. I was talking to some friends of mine a few weeks ago and we were laughing - very wryly - about how we Gen Xers were all told a mixture of ‘failure is not an option’ and ‘shut the fuck up and get over it’ at every possible opportunity. 

The message we got was that depression simply was scientifically impossible for anyone under the age of 30. These were ‘the best years of your life’ and we had nothing to complain about. And hey, on the whole that was true enough on paper. Our parents are the Baby Boomers. Their parents, our grandparents, endured World War II and The Great Depression. As you can imagine, there was no complaint I could come up with as a kid that wouldn’t get met with how good I had it compared to all of that.

You don’t have the shoes all your friends have? I didn’t have shoes. You don’t like peas? I didn’t like bread soaked in dripping for three meals a day but I’d have got a smack in the face for complaining.

And of course, stacked against all of that, we did have comfortable, privileged lives. But personally, with my parents facing bankruptcy at home and being bullied at school for my looks and my ‘poor girl’ wardrobe…. I wasn’t dealing with nothing.

When my generation were kids, our vocabulary did not include words like ‘anxiety’ or ‘depression’ or any other considerations for our ‘mental health’. And so, we resolved to shield our kids from the casual callousness of our childhoods. 

The poster child of our generation was Anthony Michael Hall’s character in The Breakfast Club - brought to the brink of nervous collapse because his parents were furious and ashamed about his B grade in workshop class. 

Oh GOD, remember when Brian couldn’t get the lamp switch to work? In shop class? A metaphor for our sick addiction to over-achievement.

When we grew up and became parents, we knee-jerked. We became the parents who resolved to reject such pressures of competition, stress and materialism on behalf our our children. We would ferociously invoke our childrens’ right to just be happy. 

Rightly or wrongly, this is who I am. I really do just want my daughter to be happy. But now I’m wondering if she’d be happier if I’d forced her to try and be so brilliant at something that it was now… making her rich?

Ted Beckham really has me wondering if I’ve dropped a ball in not forcing down one or two raw eggs.