Why every parent secretly hates the sunshine

It’s the hottest early May Bank Holiday on record and as I write this I am sat outside in the garden, the children are playing blissfully on the climbing frame and I have an ice cold Coke at hand. All is well with the world, except it wasn’t about half an hour ago.

Unfortunately, the arrival of sunshine and of temperatures that send millions of Brits to A&E with undercooked sausage-related food poisoning, means that parents across the land are obligated to perform a ritual that sends blood pressure soaring; the stand-still-while-I-put-suncream-on-you nightmare.

Applying Factor 50 to your offspring is possibly one of the most stressful things you can do on a hot day. Right up there with dressing your children on a snow day, it’s one of those thankless tasks that parents have to endure. However, unlike clothes for the winter – which should ideally stay on for the duration of your child’s exposure to the cold – sun cream requires day-long attention, commencing with the drama of the initial application.

Headache in a bottle

Sun cream, for some reason, doesn’t rub into children’s skin. It’s like spraying them with chip fat, you liberally apply it all over their skin and then spend half an hour wiping it around their bodies before giving up and letting your children out into the sun looking like albinos. Then there’s the issue of staining. For some reason the manufacturers of sun cream have never managed to make a product that, once mistakenly dolloped on to your child’s favourite T-shirt, is easy to wash off. The result is that my children’s summer wardrobe is essentially a collection of oil stained rags.

Next up, once you’ve gone through the stress of applying the suncream, you have the pressure of wondering when you need to top it up. How long does it last? No one knows. Does sweat decrease its sunblocking capabilties? Probably. And what about the swimming pool? Surely once they’ve been swimming in the sea or in the hotel pool – with all the other children, meaning that by midday there’s an oil slick covering the pool that’s a danger to passing seabirds – I have to reapply? The bottle says no, but my parental instinct says yes.

Is it worth it? Why can’t someone invent a better solution to sunburn than suncream? We’re meant to enjoy the sunshine and be grateful for the nice weather but come on, let’s all be honest for a moment, 10 minutes is probably enough. Life is so much easier when it’s cloudy and overcast.

And if anyone is prone to disagree with me, let me say just one further word in relation to the suncream nightmare: sand.

Point made.