A demented cage-fighter has taken over my home. It’s terrifying

10 July 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

It isn’t just communal property that he stakes a claim to. No toy is safe, regardless of whom it belongs to. My three-year-old son Freddie, for instance, is very attached to a pair of plastic headphones that came with his Bob the Builder workbench. Sensing this, Charlie has now decided that they belong to him and violently wrenches them from Freddie’s head at every opportunity. (‘S’mine, actually.’) Not that he has any interest in the headphones themselves, he has just latched on to them as a convenient way to assert his dominance. It’s as if Freddie has acquired a psychopathic new cellmate who insists on taking over the top bunk.

How did Charlie acquire this overbearing personality? To a certain extent it’s a function of being the youngest. He has to be more assertive than the others in order to compete. It’s also to do with his parentage. Both Caroline and I have what Americans would call ‘anger management issues’, and in Charlie our genes have combined to create a perfect storm.

But, fundamentally, it’s an example of the mystery of human personality. With all four of my children, their personalities just seemed to spring out of nowhere at the age of two. They are so distinct — so completely themselves — it seems to defy rational explanation. Until I became a parent, I never understood religious concepts like reincarnation or the soul. Now, both make perfect sense.

Of course, I can see how absurd it is to reach for a supernatural explanation. It’s an instance of the argument from design, a philosophical non-starter. As Richard Dawkins is fond of pointing out, you are not explaining anything when you invoke a concept like ‘the soul’, merely substituting one mystery for another. In any event, it falls foul of Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. No doubt Charlie’s behaviour is simply the product of various genetic predispositions being triggered by environmental causes.

Nevertheless, it is a shock to find myself sharing a house with this shrieking martinet. At lunchtime today, he came and stood by my chair as I prepared to eat a tuna steak, a glint of mischief in his eye. As my knife hovered in mid-air he let out a cry of ‘S’mine, actually’ and snatched my plate away. He then sat opposite, arms enveloping the plate and glaring at me with hot, pink little eyes.

At some point, I’m going to have to reassert my authority, but for the time being I’m too spellbound by the change that’s come over him. One minute a mewling infant, the next a 600lb gorilla. Easing Charlie back into childhood is going to be quite a challenge.