“Brownies” and their “grown-ups”

A few weeks ago there was an uproar in Certain Newspapers and across social media because a school had started to use “your grown-ups” instead of “your mum and dad”.

Let’s be clear. They were not banning the use of normal gendered parent names. They were not telling the kids not to use them. They were not imposing it on individual kids in one-on-one conversation. They were using it as a catch-all term when addressing the entire class or the entire school.

It’s nothing to do with “PC gone mad” or gender neutrality. It’s to do with the likelihood that there are kids whose home life does not revolve around the Perfect One Dad One Mum One Boy One Girl.

I used to have a Brownie who was in foster care. I believe she did have a mum somewhere but she wasn’t living with her. I never heard a dad mentioned. She was in my Brownies because the family who fostered her already had a Brownie in my pack and it made sense for both girls to go together. It was a little extra “normal” for the fostered girl, a handful of new friends and a new interest.

However, the Brownie we already had, the foster sister* – we never met her parents either. Grandma dropped both of them off and picked both of them up, brought the stuff they needed, helped out when we needed extra hands, did the badge work with them and probably would have been our emergency contact if anything happened. When the fostered girl arrived, she did the same for her. It wouldn’t make sense for me to insist on “ask your mum and dad” for either of them.

Sure, when Annie’s talking about her mum and dad, we’ll say “mum and dad” but when I’m addressing the whole unit, it’s not nice to say “give this form to your mum and dad. Except you, Betty, because you don’t have any so give it to your guardian. And you, Candy, give it to your grandma.” No, I just say to them all “give this form to your grown-ups and don’t lose it between here and the front door”.

I had a Ranger once whose emergency contact was her social worker. I had one whose mother died and handled it in an interesting, if somewhat macabre way. I had one whose mother lived halfway across the country. Yes, the majority of my girls over the years have had “mum and dad” but I’ve had enough who haven’t to become accustomed to using something a bit more inclusive. Don’t we all remember all letters and forms when we were at school being addressed to “Dear parents/guardians”? This is exactly the same, but a bit less stilted.

Obviously, I might not say “grown-ups” to Rangers – they’re too grown up themselves for that but they were always a smaller group, I knew them better and I generally treated them like peers. Maybe “you can sign it yourself when you’re 18 but until then I need it signed by an adult” or “Find out if [x] and let me know by next week” without needing to tell them to “ask your parents/guardians/grown-ups”.

The flip side of this is that I’m in the habit of referring to “your Brownie” in communications rather than the stilted 90s “your daughter/ward” or the often-inaccurate “your daughter”. No, “your Brownie” covers any kind of legal responsibility and relationship nice and neatly. And I address unit emails most informally, I’m afraid -“hi everyone” is my usual go-to. “Dear Brownies and family” occasionally, perhaps.

So keep that in mind when you’re discussing families and if you had the knee-jerk “how ridiculous!” reaction to that story, I hope you understand it better now.

*we once did an activity designed to teach the girls that they had more in common with each other than they realised and also less. Everyone lines up down the middle of the room and steps one way or the other depending on their answers to questions like “who had maths today?”, “who likes toast for breakfast?”, “who wears glasses?” and so on. We got to “who has a sister?” and these two paused in the middle and then the older one said “Well, I kind of do have a sister… but I also kind of don’t have a sister” and I said “fair enough” because we hadn’t thought about those two when we came up with the question and it’s absolutely not our job to define and name their relationship.