Laura Newell: Keep your thoughts about my parenting choices to yourself

In our family, we call them the “pursed-lip brigade”, or when we’re particularly peeved, more bluntly, the “cat’s bum brigade”.

Effectively, it’s a term to describe those people who have clearly been told by their parents or (more likely) grandparents that “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” but who have no poker face.

And I tend to find I particularly come up against such people when they are judging my parenting. When my child has a tantrum in public, perhaps, or when I used to breastfeed in public, or (shockingly!) dare to dance through the aisles of our local supermarket in a bid to make her giggle.

But never more so when our choice to send our daughter to a private school comes up, it seems.

The latest example was over the weekend when a woman was clearly eavesdropping on my conversation with friends at a café and when we mentioned private schooling.

Her cat’s bum was so extreme that I swear if the wind changed, she’d have lost the ability to speak and instead be forced to whistle for the rest of her time on Earth.

My friends and I were sharing war stories of our various weeks as our children attended an out-of-school activity, and the topic of schooling came up and why we’d chosen the schools we had. Of the group of four women, three chose a private school (myself included) and one a public school.

Cue the pursing.

Our reasons for making the choice of private v public were as varied as our personalities: one for religious reasons; another because they are a teacher themselves and valued the approach a particular school took for their little one; and my husband and I chose to use the private system as our local school in Perth’s “far northern suburbs” is not *ahem* doing so well when it comes to performance.

It may come as no great surprise to anyone that the sole public school child among the group lives in Perth’s more leafy inner suburbs and goes to what is considered one of the best primary schools in the State — public or private. Lucky them.

Funnily enough, the mum herself pointing this out didn’t seem to hold sway with our judgmental friend at the café. Her lips remained resolutely puckered so tight one could have successfully poked a tea towel between them and had it hold up all day.

More seriously, though, the part of the whole private v public school issue that really gets my goat is that, so often the argument made is that if we all put the money that is spent on private schooling into public schools, all children would get top-class education.

Well, perhaps in that ideal world we all wish we lived in, yes.

But equally, that also doesn’t encompass all the reasons people choose such schools, for example if — like our friends — you are religious, or perhaps subscribe to a slightly different teaching method, (Waldorf,-Steiner, anyone?) or, even, family tradition.

And even if that weren’t the case, the hypocrisy of the equality argument astounds me. Let’s take a different scenario or two and see if you still believe that public is always best for your family.

How about we say the same thing about private car ownership. Hey, if we all gave up our private cars, we could make public transport gold-plated?

Oddly, I’m not seeing too many people advocating that when we talk about congestion or climate change.

Or, possibly more realistically, private healthcare. Wonder how we could reallocate those funds to improve our ailing public health system, eh?

Amusingly, and interestingly, so many people who have openly criticised our choice to place our child into private school while they send their little one to a public school chose a private birthing suite instead of “supporting” their local public hospital.

Now, I’m far from saying that public schools are all crap — I went to one for primary school and it was awesome — and I’m not saying we shouldn’t invest far more into them (we absolutely should).

But I am telling you that the choice of private v public isn’t a straightforward one and it’s time for the cat’s bum brigade to invest in a decent face mask as none of us need to see that as we enjoy of morning coffee.