You don't need brains to be a good parent

Despite what some people think, you don't have to be a genius to raise a child successfully. All you need to do is give them the love and care they deserve

A smart baby reads a newspaper (Getty)

Just because you have a string of qualifications under your name, it doesn’t mean you are going to be a great parent. So goes the latest pronouncement from Chancery, in the guise of Mrs Justice Parker, who made it during a custody hearing involving a mother who has a learning disability.

The child wouldn’t necessarily be better off being brought up by someone more intellectually able, she said. According to her Honour, “many clever people make absolutely rotten parents”, and courts should not necessarily have negative attitudes to those less intellectually blessed.

Well, of course. Genius doesn’t guarantee great parenting technique, as anyone who has ever read a biography of Charles Dickens will acknowledge. From the negligent Uncle Quentin in the Famous Five, who was forever (rather handily for plot reasons) locked away in his study, to any number of misery memoirs from the children of famous brain-boxes, it does not follow that the higher the IQ, the better the upbringing.

Indeed, one could also class the stereotypical parenting practise enjoyed by the professional classes as highly suspect, what with its hours of bought-in child-care, enforced journeys around museums, the ever-present threat of an afterschool tutor and hopelessly high expectations in the collective fields of musical aptitude, mathematical ability and enjoyment of Renaissance art.

Indeed, only the other day my youngest son (9), told me in no uncertain terms that “the National Gallery is the most boring place in the world, second only to the Prado," a weary summary of privilege, frustration and parental expectation (mine) in one fell swoop.

And yet, intuitively, one also might be tempted to think that in the thwarted circumstances of a custody battle, the best parent is probably going to be the one with lots of books in the house, where the television is usually tuned to BBC4, or Newsnight, and where there might be violins propped up in the drawing room.

Or, put more precisely, the sort of house that you might quite like to live in yourself.

I have never presided over a custody arrangement, nor would I wish to. But in making the judgment of Solomon I suspect that many well-thinking lawyers favour parents who, to put it simply, live the sort of life and look after their children in the same sort of way that they do. It is human nature to approve of people who resemble yourself.

This trait is not new, as anybody who has heard the dinner-party commonplace, “oh, we sent our child to (insert name of private school) only because everyone else does”, will know.

In a 2006 survey by Bristol University, it was found that social workers also tended to have negative attitudes to less intellectually capable parents, sometimes even breaking up loving families for no other reason than that they feared the parents weren’t bright enough.

Perhaps what the insight provided by this sad case all boils down to is that the legal profession needs to cast its net a little wider. No, not in terms of intellectual aptitude, but in terms of background, so that one has a group of judges who won’t simply favour the parents from what one might call a “broadsheet” household.

The sense of privilege which comes streaming out of the Inns of Court is legendary. Maybe if more judges came from a “normal” background, then parents wouldn’t have to fear competing in some sort of intellectual high jump in order to prove that they can look after their offspring perfectly well.

And I would guess that even if that happens, not many judges will be as perceptive as the wise Mrs Justice Parker, who stated that “many people who are intellectually impaired…are warm and caring and provide children with a wonderful upbringing”.

Plenty of children outshine their parents intellectually anyway. What’s needed is love, and for that you don’t need any qualifications.

It’s not beauty that sends the Christie’s bidders into a spin

Tracey Emin’s My Bed is to go on auction at Christie’s this summer. Bought by Charles Saatchi for £150,000 in 2000, it is now expected to sell for about a million quid.

Should this be the case, one can safely expect a rash of carping from various quarters about the notion of spending a million oners on a piece of furniture exhibiting stained sheets, stained knickers, discarded condoms, cigarette ends and an empty bottle of vodka.

“Better your money than mine,” sceptics will say with faux bewilderment, knowing full well that such an iconic piece will obviously fly high in the sales room.

My Bed isn’t going to get a million because it is a beautiful piece of art, any more than the gold-engraved bottle of Chateau Margaux which sold for £122,000 would be a nice thing to drink over dinner. It’s a commodity, and such things are ciphers for something else, usually the wealth and taste of the buyer.

We can only hope that whoever purchases My Bed has more than a passing fondness for modern British art. Who could forget the time it was exhibited in Tate Britain and a semi-naked pair of performance artists joyously jumped on it, not because they thought that they had wandered into the John Lewis furnishings department, but in order to make a further work, entitled Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey’s Bed. And that, by the way, is art.

BBC is right to ban this lazy language

“Girl”. It’s the latest word to be frowned upon by the BBC, which has edited it out of a forthcoming documentary on the Commonwealth Games. Not because it was describing a female under the age of 18, but because it was used by a (male) presenter to describe a 19-year-old judo champion. Political correctness gone mad!

Of course, the usual suspects are hopping up and down with delight, hooting about how “girl” is a perfectly usual description for a woman, and frankly, how most women would be delighted to be called a girl. Well, I’m not. And I am glad the BBC has ruled against this most patronising term. I once complained about being called a “girl” by two men on Channel 4. I was immediately branded a boring feminist, and ungrateful to boot. No, I said patiently. There are two girls in the Millard household. One is 11 and one is 16. Would you like to be called “boys?” Really?