Mark Woods: In complex times we need wisdom

Now the new school year has well and truly kicked in, the mind-melting merry-go-round of pick-ups and drop-offs returns to torment the millions of working parents around the country. Complex charts have begun to appear on kitchen notice boards attempting to make sense of a web of daily duties so fiendish in their complexity that not even GCHQ could fully crack their childcare code. Fuelled by book-bag transported notes from The Head Teacher of Marxian (Groucho not Karl) quality the intricate timetable is peppered with more caveats than a UN declaration.

“PE kit is required every alternate Wednesday and Friday (except in November when only Wednesday will be required. Apart from the final week when the school assembly will be moved to the Wednesday and PE will revert to the Friday. Please see separate note on Assembly requirements.”

Clear? Good. Able to cover it all and hold down two full-time jobs? Absolutely not. In days gone by when mortgages didn’t need to be eight times what your salary would be if you earnt double what you actually do things perhaps would have been a little simpler.

However, one of the biggest and often most overlooked factors that has contributed to the frazzled look worn by the majority of today’s parents is that millions of us have moved away from our family networks. This is more than just about missing out on a bit of babysitting, recent research says the very creation of civilisation itself is all down to the invention of nana and grandad. Anthropologist Rachel Caspari of Central Michigan University has discovered that once humans first found a way to keep old people alive everything changed.

Old people knew about the natural world, how to recover from disasters, where the best food is and which enemies are best avoided.

Historical records suggest that when older people help take care of grandchildren, the little ones are more likely to survive, so much so that living long enough to help raise your children’s children looks like being the reason that we are all here today.

Mum, Dad, brace yourselves, I’m coming home.

Twitter @mark_r_ woods