Parents are narcissists

I was sat in a cafe with the baby. It was the usual set-up: I read the sport while she ate the entire news section. The print had rubbed off on her face. Something about Zimbabwe was emblazoned across her chin and a worrying statistic about knife crime was dribbling down her right cheek.

The prim looking mums on the next table shot us the occasional disapproving look while harping on about their irritating, clean-faced kids. "Cressida is so anarchic!" said one, as her daughter lobbed a plastic spoon out of the push-chair. "I don't know where she gets that from!"

Then she chuckled knowingly in a way that she hoped would say, "Obviously, I think we all know who she gets that from: me! Because, despite the fact that I appear to be a charmless, braying, walking cliche with nothing better to do than sit around sipping lattes all day, talking a load of meaningless shit about my offspring or the decking in my garden or whatever, I am - in actual fact - a completely anarchic maverick who is living life on her own zany terms!" You know - that sort of a chuckle.

This is what parents do. They attribute the characteristics displayed by their children to themselves. It's basically a way of commentating on your own personality in a way that would ordinarily be deemed psychotically narcissistic and socially unacceptable.

The big joke is that kids under one year old all share pretty similar characteristics anyway: all the spoon-throwing and gurning and shrieking and pissing themselves is not the result of genetic inheritance, it's just what babies do. I looked back at my 11-month-old. She was vomiting up the business section in a horrible, greyish pulp.

"That's my girl," I thought. ·