Raising competent children means trusting them. Trusting them means exposing them to risk. Risk, for a parent, means having faith in the world in which we live and, perhaps more frighteningly, in other people. A mother has to learn to trust her child to be left alone, which means she is going to have to actually leave her child alone. This becomes difficult when other people do not share the same tolerance for risk and trust. Such was the case recently in Virginia, where a mother was convicted of child negligence simply for permitting her five-year-old son to walk to a local pond by himself. It is a sad and ridiculous story that is all too familiar: nothing is more dangerous to social cohesion than a nosy do-gooder with nothing better to do than interfere with the trivialities of her neighbors’ lives. 

Yet, without blaming the mother for anything, there are aspects to the Virginian case which reveal the timidity of a low-trust society and the lack of goodwill that it produces. To begin with, the events occurred within a gated community with its own security guard. Williamsburg, Virginia boasts a crime rate much lower than the national average. Why the need for a locked and guarded community if the city is already relatively safe? And why didn’t the nosy neighbor, instead of alerting the security guard, simply make sure the boy got home safely? Was she trying to be meddlesome or genuinely helpful? If helpful, why the lack of personal involvement?

This little vignette of suburban life reveals a number of breakdowns within the social order. There is no tolerance for risk, no trust in one’s neighbors, no Good Samaritan attitude. The gated community’s security guard, the busybody, and the courts that convicted the mother of child endangerment seem to have had good intentions: the care and safety of a child. Instead it seems that the social fabric itself was the problem. How can a parent have faith in the goodwill of the world when the world’s sense of goodness is itself tenuous and hollow?  

This is the question I have been asking myself ever since my daughter left for university. Educational institutions, as we know, aren’t ideologically neutral. The experts’ care of children is often at odds with parents’ care for them. This is particularly clear when it comes to specific issues, such as the social gender transition of children at school without parental knowledge. But in fact all the biggest questions we face as a society today — belief in God or in atheism, merit or diversity, asylum policies or immigration laws, communism or capitalism, free speech or censorship — fall under the purview of educational authority. Virtually no area of public or personal life is left unmonitored by the experts. The authorities aren’t necessarily at odds with what parents might teach, but they are harbingers of what often feels like a unified force of acceptable thinking. The entire education system can feel very much like a nosy neighbor whose best intentions for the convictions of your child interfere dangerously with your own. It is not uncommon for a mother to feel her influence over her child cede to the pervasive influence of the system. In the saddest cases, a child interiorizes the authority of public opinion and becomes, not merely alienated from her parents, but contemptuous of them. 

One of the most chilling aspects of Orwell’s portrayal of totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the elimination of private life. The Party is everywhere, even inside one’s home. Children have no natural bonds, no family loyalty, and no preference for one’s own. Mrs Parsons, Winston’s neighbor, has two young children, and she is afraid of them. “What struck Winston,” Orwell writes, “was the look of helpless fright on the woman’s greyish face” as her children shriek about traitors and thoughtcrimes. “With those children,” Winston thinks, “that woman must lead a life of terror.” We may not live in a state where a child might narc out Mom and Dad to the thoughtcrime police, as they frequently do in Orwell’s dystopia, but the feeling that there are forces hostile to one’s own family sphere operating within the family itself is never, for some, entirely absent. It is one thing to be put out by a meddling neighbor, quite another to tiptoe around one’s own child as though avoiding re-education in Big Brother’s Ministry of Love.

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The cruelty of gentle parenting

By Marilyn Simon

Hannah Arendt writes that totalitarian terror is accomplished when private life is gone — that is, when tyranny makes solitude impossible and loneliness complete. She teases out the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian rule. A tyranny of any kind is undesirable, but under an authoritarian regime, it is still possible to be free in private: “The whole sphere of private life with the capacities for experience, fabrication and thought are left intact.” By contrast, under the “iron band of total terror”, she writes, there remains “no space for such private life and […] the self-coercion of totalitarian logic destroys man’s capacity for experience and thought just as certainly as his capacity for action”. It is the infiltration of The Party into the home that sent shudders both through Orwell and Arendt. 

Mr Parsons, Winston’s thoroughly orthodox neighbor, is eventually reported to Big Brother by his seven-year-old daughter for committing a thoughtcrime in his sleep. “‘Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,’” he tells Winston when they meet inside a cell at the Ministry of Love. “‘Do you know how it got me? In my sleep! Yes, that’s a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit – never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying? […] “Down with Big Brother!” Yes, I said that!’” Parsons is appalled, not to have been betrayed by his child, but to have had unorthodox thoughts that cut against The Party. 

Parsons bears an uncomfortable resemblance to nice people, the ones who seem to be correctly informed on all the issues and hold polite values. This is the type of parent who gently nods while explaining to their children that “everyone should do what feels right for them” or “the most important thing is to respect everyone”. Sentiments such as these aren’t incorrect. They are so entirely correct as to be banal — odious, somehow. If one has a bit of a rebellious side — is a little irreverent or impertinent or even just very funny — it feels dangerous to spend time with someone who believes in all the correct things. “Say something fucking wrong!” I want to shout at them. “Say it just to say it, to show that the public world doesn’t hold jurisdiction over your home, your family, and your private world.”

The home should remain a place for private life. It cannot be private unless one resists the intrusion of The Ministry of Nice. The home should be a safe place for dangerous ideas. If one wants a child capable of navigating the pathways of the world, of slipping past the notice of busybodies who are ready to report any whiff of risky thinking, they need a place where social conventions can be discarded, or ridiculed, or accepted. In order for our culture’s sense of goodness to sound, our understanding of the good cannot be synonymous with our sense of the nice. Sentimentalism might make one feel comfortable, but ease does not reflect coherent thought nor offer any guidance for a young person’s fledgling intellectual freedom.

A friend of mine recently joked that Gen Xers are the only people to be told, “You can’t say that”, first by our parents and now by our kids. Show your kids that you can say things inside the home. Normalize wrongspeak. Teach them how to feel free, to try on wrong ideas without the timidity that comes from cultural surveillance of well-intentioned busybodies.

We were lucky that Gemma*, the social worker who had conducted the initial assessment a few months earlier, demonstrated a modicum of humor as she guided me through the process, intervening whenever I said the wrong thing.

“Do you have a diverse mix of toys?” she asked, when I told her that I was preparing to join the vacancy list.

“Oh yes, loads — boys’ and girls’ stuff,” I reassured her, thinking of my two birth children. She gave a cautionary shake of her head. “Well, I mean, girls can play with boys’ toys, of course, and vice versa,” I added hastily, cottoning on. “They can choose.”

“I think what you mean is,” Gemma said, the corner of her mouth twitching, “you believe children should be free to explore, without being limited by stereotypes. But also, do you have toys reflecting an appreciation and commitment to diversity?”

“Oh,” I said, looking at our pale-faced Barbies. “’Fraid not. But I can buy some.”

Gemma paused. “I won’t put that,” she said, pen hovering over her form. “Let’s just say you understand the importance of providing an environment that reflects a child’s cultural background, yes?”

“Absolutely,” I said, because I did.

If a child were to be placed with us, I would of course do my best to help them feel at home, whatever their background. I have wanted to foster since I was 13 and I discovered that my own father had grown up in care. Since having my own children, that drive had only grown stronger. Over several months, I had been quizzed about my past, my finances, my motivations. My children had been interviewed, along with several referees. And still the diversity-minded questions kept coming.

“Do you have enough cooking equipment to keep food separate, if required?” Gemma wanted to know.

“Er, no, probably not. But again, I can buy a few extra pans.”

Gemma nodded, making a note of my flexibility. “And you’re happy to buy and cook halal?” I hesitated. “It’s easier,” Gemma said encouragingly. “That way you can all eat from the same dish.”

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By Rosie Lewis

And this, it turns out, is one of the sticking points that never appears on the glossy leaflets that advertise fostering. Most applicants know they need a spare bedroom and enough household income to absorb a drop in working hours. They need, in other words, to be comfortably middle class — which already rules out the working-class women who were once the bedrock of fostering. These maternal figures were more than happy to shift things around to bring another child into the fold, stretching to make one more place at the dinner table. But they struggled to master the institutional lingo and cultural demands of modern social work, with its increasingly bureaucratic, say-the-right-thing-in-the-right-way demands, its daily diaries, monthly logs and at least 30 hours’ formal training each year.

Now, even being well-off isn’t enough. Applicants are interrogated so vigorously that many drop off the vacancy list. Meanwhile, even those of us who tick all the procedural boxes are stranded in the middle, never quite accepted into the ranks of professional social workers — but no longer permitted to use our parental intuition either.

It’s important to stress that the rules are there for entirely understandable reasons: foster carers are expected actively to maintain a child’s religious and cultural identity, especially since many of these children will ultimately return to their birth families. As such, the National Minimum Standards, introduced in 2011, require foster carers to learn about and support the ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds of the children in their care. This might involve preparing traditional foods, buying religious items like prayer mats, and resisting the urge to encourage a child who eats with their hands to use cutlery instead. Families might also observe religious holidays and celebrations; attend worship; facilitate prayer habits; and, if they are on the register for emergency fostering, keep a stock of suitable cultural products such as cocoa or shea butter for Afro hair care.

Foster carers must also complete equity, diversity and inclusion training, refreshed every two years, or sooner if they’ve fallen foul of the regulations. As part of this training, they will be warned not to take a child with Afro hair to a non-specialist salon; many carers have been mortified to find this mistake framed as a “cultural erasure” safeguarding issue by their agency or local authority. Indeed, one of my close fostering friends was accused of racism when she washed a child with Afro-textured hair using ordinary baby shampoo. The same carer had been devastated the previous year: having lovingly fostered a black child from birth, she was refused the chance to adopt her.

Preventing cultural friction is a tightrope for foster carers, and it’s a challenge that arises often: 28% of children in care are BAME, while only 13% of carers come from a minority background. Children are bewildered when they are removed from their home, so the least we fosterers can do is to make sure they’re not completely severed from any sense of who they are. But as long as a child’s needs are met in a warm and loving environment, does it really matter that a family ticks every ideological box? When does necessary scrutiny tip over into bureaucratic nitpicking?

Every child is carefully matched with a foster family, or should be. On that basis, it seems common sense not to place a child from, say, a devout Muslim family with a family who would be uncomfortable buying halal or taking them to a mosque. Nor would it be appropriate to place a practicing Christian child with a family averse to churchgoing. I said as much to Gemma, who gave me another pointed look. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Let’s just say you’re happy to use different cooking equipment to avoid pork contamination, yes?”

I agreed. It seemed an unnecessary hill to die on, but over the years I’ve met many otherwise loving, public-spirited, well-functioning families who have been put off, or sometimes excluded outright, because they were judged “too rigid” or “lacking the cultural competence” needed to cope with placements that may never even arise.

I know applicants who have been turned down for being honest about their reluctance to support a hypothetical teenager through gender transition. Others were deemed too “actively Christian”, a curious stance considering that until the middle of last century, the care of vulnerable children was almost entirely administered by the Church. Another applicant was regarded with suspicion for failing to demonstrate a sufficiently diverse social network, despite living in a largely white-British village.

The shortage of foster homes is well-evidenced: in England, the number of approved mainstream foster carers fell from 63,890 in 2021 to 56,345 in March 2025 — a 12% decline. Earlier this year, the Children’s Minister, Janet Daby, identified a shortfall of 6,500 foster homes, citing a “stubborn decline to the point of crisis”. Yet recruitment data shows that of 125,195 initial inquiries to become foster parents, only 6% progressed to applications. Only a minority of these will make it to the approval panel stage, where their ability to foster is officially decided.

It is, of course, quite right that authorities ward off unsuitable candidates. Applicants must be thoroughly vetted. The initial “Skills to Foster” course is designed to offer a warts-and-all view of fostering, thus weeding out those who aren’t cut out for it. Nobody disputes that safeguarding should be a priority. Fostering is demanding, and a high dropout rate is inevitable. Yet the same standard is not applied evenly. I know of a number of Muslim foster carers who state plainly, without any fear that it may jeopardize their registration, that they would never consider fostering a child from outside their own faith. With a growing number of Muslim children coming into care and a low number of suitable matches, it seems practical and pragmatic to accept carers who have limits and are honest about them.

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But why not extend this flexibility to all applicants nationally, instead of insisting that they demonstrate, explicitly and repeatedly, that they would welcome a child from any background? The same bureaucratic rigidity that has contributed to a steep drop in foster-carer numbers has, in recent years, seeped into other public services such as policing and nursing, filtering out many people with a natural ability to read a room and build a rapid rapport with people in crisis who might be eminently suitable for the job.

Let’s stop alienating potential carers who fail to adopt the correct language and instead bring back some appreciation of qualities that are harder to measure: warmth, kindness, competency, common sense. If a potential adopter has concerns about cooking halal meat for animal welfare reasons, or wouldn’t feel equipped to support a teenager through medical transition, why not allow them to honor their personal beliefs and match them with children accordingly?

The need is urgent. With a national shortage of foster carers, local authorities are resorting to using unregistered care homes at a cost of up to £10,000 per week per child. In some cases, that money ends up in the accounts of shell companies linked to organized crime. Meanwhile, public-spirited families with empty spare rooms are being turned away.

The financial waste is staggering, but the real tragedy is the human cost. A new Government report has found that care leavers are four times more likely to die early than their peers. That is why rejecting decent, well-meaning potential carers is indefensible. The result of rigidity is simple: fewer carers, and more children in unsafe, sometimes dangerous placements.

*Names have been changed.

The Inquiry finds that there had been obvious signs of danger for several years prior to the attack. When he was 13, Rudakubana’s school had noted his unhealthy obsession with violence. He confided to Childline that he wanted to kill a schoolmate and that he had taken a knife into school for this purpose. Schools, Children’s Services, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS), Child and Youth Justice, the Police — all had fragments of information. But somehow, this never formed a complete picture. No one agency realized just how dangerous Rudakubana had become, and none, therefore, took the required action. Alongside more localized recommendations for individual agencies, Fulford finds a need for greater inter-agency cooperation and information sharing.

Alongside this, though, the Inquiry also places significant related blame at the door of Rudakubana’s parents, especially his father, for a “combative and unhelpful attitude”. The agencies’ failure to intervene more effectively, Fulford concludes, is partly down to how hard the parents made that job. The parents “sought to avoid, rather than engage with, the statutory services that were available to them”, and were “deliberately selective” which agencies they shared information with. They “refused to take legitimate professional concerns seriously”. They “wanted to try to control the narrative”, sometimes “trying to turn professionals against each other” for this purpose. The parents, Fulford argues, should have “trusted” the agencies, and empowered said agencies to control their son’s case.

It is at this point that Fulford’s narrative begins to seriously trouble me, as I’m sure it will many parents of autistic children. Rudakubana is autistic. And as a parent of (non-violent) autistic children myself, I have also (variously) either done, or been falsely recorded as doing, each of the above things that Fulford castigates the parents for, in one form or another. So too have thousands upon thousands of others. And we have had good reason. If Rudakubana’s parents didn’t see fit to “trust” the agencies — if they felt it was often better to selectively withhold information, if they drew on what some agencies had said to put pressure on the accounts of other agencies — well, in general terms, that all sounds exceptionally reasonable to me. We need to talk about trustworthiness.

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So let’s back up a little. Autism is not especially rare; while it’s hard to estimate actual prevalence, it’s plausibly something like 5% of the population. What is it like to be a parent of an autistic child in England today?

Well, it’s a lot of things, several of which might cast interesting additional perspectives on the Fulford report. But I want to single out one in particular. While parenting an autistic child also has its more intrinsic challenges, for many of us, by far the most stressful aspects arise from interactions with schools and public services. Not only do many of these services fundamentally fail to understand autism — crucially, they also fail to acknowledge that they don’t understand autism. In particular, it is routine for public agencies to throw honesty, integrity, balance and ordinary epistemic standards completely out of the window when dealing with autistic children and their parents. The results for families are devastating.

The following scenario is pretty typical. (Honestly: the scenario itself is fictional, but I’ve constructed it largely from a collage of actual cases.) Meet Ben. Ben is an intelligent, articulate eight-year-old. He is also autistic, though perhaps not yet formally “diagnosed” as such. Things have mostly seemed fine for Ben so far, but in the last couple of months, the wheels have started to come off as regards school. Ben is increasingly reluctant to go. When his parents do manage to get him there, he clams up. It’s hard for his teachers to get him to enter the classroom.

What’s actually going on is that Ben, like so many other autistic children before and after him, finds the mainstream school environment overwhelming. For him, it’s a perfect storm of social complexity, unclear expectations, sensory overwhelm, unpredictability. The rough equivalent for a neurotypical child would be an environment in which they were poked all over at one-second intervals with needles, while blasted with loud music, while told to stand on one leg and correctly discriminate between jokes that are funny and those that are unfunny by someone else’s standards, on pain of ridicule. Now, at the same time — and with the other hand please — write a one-page news report from the point of view of a penguin visiting your school for a day. Detention if I don’t like what you write.

Ben simply can’t do it any more. The whole place terrifies and bewilders him. It feels dangerous. His mouth goes dry and he gets stabbing chest pains at the very thought of it. Ben desperately needs the adults around him to understand this.

This is not the way the school sees things, however. In their version of the story, Ben is being stubborn and disobedient, and making bad choices. He needs to learn that he can’t always just do what he feels like, and that ignoring instructions from adults is unacceptable. The solution is to be more strict with him; there need to be consequences for noncompliance. And since there’s clearly nothing wrong with the school, the cause of all this must be parenting deficiencies.

Slightly taken aback by the suggestion but knowing that they have nothing to hide, Ben’s parents accept that a social worker is to visit their home. But the social worker already knows, going in, what her answer must be. The home environment and the parenting style are picked apart. It doesn’t look like a neurotypical household! The social worker gives the parents the lists of changes they need to make, copy-pasted out of Parenting 101.

The next part of the story has two versions; choose your own adventure. In the first, the parents humbly agree that they have been doing it all wrong, and follow the social worker’s advice. Then Ben really loses it. It turns out that all those little adaptations to his individual needs that his parents had made at home over the years, by experimentation and parental intuition, had made the home his safe haven, his one fixed point in an otherwise bewildering world. In the second version, Ben’s parents are wise to this; they politely but assertively explain to the social worker what traditional parenting methods are often contraindicated for autistic children, and that what they are already doing works for their family. Bad move: the social worker adds to her file the especially damning fact that the parents are difficult, that they refuse to accept “professional” guidance. Never mind that the professionals in question are not autism professionals — or the fact that actual autism professionals would generally back up the parents’ account.

Either way, the social worker goes away with her notes. The parents are neglectful, the home life is chaotic and lacking in boundaries, and the parents are either unable or unwilling to implement the required improvements. Ben’s parents receive a letter from Children’s Services. “We have been informed that you are placing barriers in the way of your child’s education.” Statutory social service intervention in the family is now under consideration.

Ben himself, though unaware of the story developing behind the scenes, spirals further into crippling anxiety, as the school pursues exactly the wrong response to his neurotype. Ben’s parents are meanwhile steadily going out of their minds with worry, both about Ben’s immediate plight and about being referred to social services. His dad loses his job at his next review, no longer able to perform effectively while all this is occupying his headspace. This is the agencies’ “support” for Ben and his family.

Such anecdotes became loud and frequent enough that NHS England commissioned West Midlands ADASS, an association of social care professionals, to investigate. The result was a 2024 report: “Blamed instead of helped: How parents of autistic children experience parental blame when they approach services for support.” The investigation found that 86% of parents experienced “parent blame” after seeking support for their autistic child along roughly the lines of the above.

“Having been placed on Child Protection, I felt the immense injustice in this,” the report quotes one parent as saying; “[t]hey ripped apart every facet of my life in the CP reports. It was a manuscript of grotesque lies, misinterpretations, and invasions.” “Coping with the blame and having to defend ourselves from false accusations has led to a delay in our ability to get the right help,” writes another. “Discriminated against because Health [service] lied to cover up their own negligence which has been utterly horrific and traumatizing,” relates a third. Parents report the development of complex PTSD, nervous breakdown and relationship breakdown. Some families choose to withdraw their child from formal education, or to move overseas, to escape.

I found out about this because I am part of this 86%. A while back, I spent a few months liaising with my son’s school and local authority, in a quest for appropriate support for his education. While the lack of autism awareness was blatant, the “parent blame” in my own case was applied more subtly, primarily in agency documents that I was never meant to see. I happened to obtain these documents via Subject Access Request, some time later. Reading those documents (and re-reading them, as I really should stop doing) transports me into an alternative reality. “A manuscript of grotesque lies, misinterpretations and invasions” is a pretty accurate description. In addition to the list of alleged safeguarding concerns, I was surprised to read in the official records that, just like Rudakubana’s parents, I too have apparently refused to acknowledge or discuss numerous legitimate concerns from professionals — concerns whose existence, in my case, nobody ever mentioned to me. I was surprised to read that I too have denied relevant professionals appropriate access to support my child — access that they never asked for, for “support” that they never offered. I’m officially considered a “safeguarding” risk to my child; my family is now “known to social services”, and will be forevermore.

My first reaction to all this was shock and disbelief — then anger, disgust, irrational shame, a raging sense of injustice, everything mixed together. I haven’t slept properly for several months now, since receiving that SAR. The words keep going round in my head in the small hours. I’m hypervigilant now at the school drop-off, always wondering what crime I might be committing today that could tip us over the edge into a formal safeguarding referral. I’m wise now to how things can be distorted, once the school has decided on an uncharitable interpretation of a particular family. Somebody wiped their mouth on their sleeve? “Children’s clothes are routinely soiled.” One of my children runs ahead to join her friend? “Parents have been observed not to exercise adequate supervision for ensuring children’s safety.” A child has a meltdown on the way in? God forbid. I’m on anxiety medication now for the first time in my life. Still, looking at the stories in the West Midlands ADASS report, I guess I am one of the lucky ones.

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Returning to the Southport Inquiry, all this raises two questions for me. First: while the Southport Inquiry did allow a voice to Rudakubana’s parents, it draws very heavily on agency accounts. Such agencies are known to have widespread practices of misinterpretation, distortion and outright lying in their narratives about parents of struggling autistic children. I am not in general a cynical person but I do wonder: how much credence, exactly, should we give to the Inquiry’s narrative about the parents?

But even if Fulford’s own conclusions about Rudakubana’s parents are fair and accurate as far as they go — the second, more important, thing is that there is a further question. Let us grant, at least for the sake of argument, that Rudakubana’s parents were somewhat (or very) uncooperative with agencies, that they sometimes sought to avoid agency involvement, that they were selective in information sharing, and so on. Let us also grant that these things contributed to the tragic events of 29 July 2024. The further question is: why did the parents behave in those ways, insofar as they did? And just how unreasonable were they to do so?

Well, I don’t know. But in light of the above, a rather obvious speculative answer does suggest itself. If Rudakubana’s parents started out fully trusting and cooperative, but withdrew much of that trust as a direct result of their agency interactions, they would be far from alone. In the West Midlands ADASS investigation, 73% of parents surveyed report doing the same thing; I myself have done the same thing.

Seeking to avoid the “services” that are available to me, and being deliberately selective about which ones to share information with? Absolutely; I’d have to be mad not to. I know now that I have to be careful in picking the services that understand neurodivergence and actually provide useful support, and to avoid the parent-blamers like the plague. A desire to reclaim some control over the narrative? If the official narrative says that my child is stubbornly choosing to miss out on his education as a result of lack of boundaries in the home, yes please, some opportunity to correct that narrative would be nice. Trying to turn professionals against one another? Well, if that means things like paying a psychologist to write a letter saying the same things that I’ve been trying to tell the school about what my child does and doesn’t need, then tick, I’ve done that. Do I trust the school, after all this, not to manipulate the information they record? You must be kidding.

Over the centuries, we have made enormous progress toward the ideal of having the right institutions in place for effective cooperation where it is needed, and ensuring the warranted trust that allows those institutions to be effective. But gaps remain, and we must recognize them. And where we find them, it is our responsibility, as a society, to fix them. Trust has to be earned. Support for autistic children is one such gap.

This is not to exonerate the parents in the Southport case. There are obviously differences between Rudakubana’s case and that of a non-violent child who merely struggles to access education. But if, as Sir Fulford concludes, the parents’ lack of trust in the agencies contributed to the tragedy of 29 July 2024, and if in addition, as I have speculated, the parents’ lack of trust might have been entirely warranted — well, it does bear some thought.

But as I’ve gotten older — and I’d like to think wiser — and as my own worldview has evolved, I’ve started to understand that the joy I experience around kids is not just about surplus energy or drawing a contrast with my New York City lifestyle, but actually the activation of an inborn paternal instinct. Some part of my being has a desire to make what sociobiologist Robert Trivers calls “parental investment.” That is to say: to play a crucial role in the future, to sacrifice something, to be a part of a clan and not just an isolated hedonic maximizer.

My generation, Millennials, is having children later, and at lower percentage rates than generations that came before us — only 40% of Millennial men are fathers, compared to 46% of Gen Xers, and only 33% live with a spouse and children, as compared to 66% of Gen X men. Among Zoomers, breeding is even less likely, in part thanks to a significant gender gap: 57% of Zoomer men want kids (a priority valued much more highly among Trump voters), but only 46% of Zoomer women want them (and likely they don’t want them with Trump voters). Add to this the ethos of AI, robotics, and life extension, and it suggests that one of the many schisms coming to our civilization will be that of the childless versus the parents: those who maximize life extension and hedonism, and those who value what will start to be considered “trad immortality” — that is, old-fashioned biological procreation. I don’t mean that everyone will fall into just these two camps, of course, but that this distinction will be a meaningful and historical one. The seeds of it are already planted. 

Much is said, and rightly so, about the consequences of delayed parenting for women: both positive and negative. But there is far less emphasis on the consequences of delayed parenting for men. Men also undergo hormonal, neurological, and psychological changes when they become fathers. As biological anthropologist Christopher Kuzawa writes, “humans are unusual among mammals in that our offspring are dependent upon older individuals for feeding and protection for more than a decade.” 

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Men, like women transform when they have to provide care and protection to a family. The shifts are less obvious but no less existentially and morally meaningful. Men of my generation, however, are reaching or crossing the boundary of age 40 not only without having had kids, but without ever having thought about having kids, and thus remaining in what can only be deemed a long adolescence — or a long 20s, at least.

To be sure, not everybody should have children. And I suspect that lifelong bachelors do play a valuable role in civilization (for instance, there’s a reason why historically almost no philosophers have been married). Certainly some people’s most procreative acts are creative and intellectual, and not biological. But on the whole, something is wrong with a society in which increasingly few men unlock the deepest meaning of their own masculinity — a tissue-deep meaning. In a 2014 Emory University study, fathers showed much higher levels of plasma oxytocin, higher prolactin, and lower testosterone than non-fathers. A landmark 2011 longitudinal study out of Northwestern found that the men with the highest testosterone — the most competitive, virile males by the manosphere’s own metrics — were the most likely to become fathers, and then experienced declines of roughly a third in their testosterone levels after becoming fathers: peak masculinity leads to fatherhood, and fatherhood transforms it. For some in the manosphere, this sounds like a disaster (because “high T” is God), but we are meant to become less aggressive and more nurturing when we have children. 

Fathers also live longer than non-fathers, even controlling for marital status. Fathers show lower rates of mental illness and engage in fewer risky behaviors. Moving away from the reductionist sociobiological point of view, any serious reader of great literature knows that fatherhood is often the mark of the hero, of a boy transformed into a man, who is ready to apply the lessons of his long education to the future and the next generation.

Whether extrapolating from Tolstoy — think of the birth of Prince Andrei’s son in the first part of War and Peace — or science, it is not hard to see why a world with fewer fathers, and a lower share of fathers, is less healthy, less civilized, less enmeshed in the meaning and drive of life.

Earlier this year, the internet writer and former academic sociologist Justin Murphy wrote a long post on X, perhaps to provoke conversation, about his own dislike of being a father. The responses to his post were, to my mind, salutary: one premise of Murphy’s confession was that fatherhood is central to manhood, and that manhood without fatherhood — or without a taste for fatherhood or love of fatherhood — is a manhood or masculinity that must question itself and interrogate itself. Certainly this is the right track. 

The gulf is wide between the pleasures of a civilization that suspends adolescence forever and the ancient challenge of sacrificing one’s own gratification for the sake of new life and of the future. What Murphy’s viral post demonstrates is that it’s hard to transition from an easy life to a difficult one, where you must be ultimately responsible and seek more than self-fulfillment. I have this anxiety myself. One reason for it is that men of my generation never learned how to overcome such feelings. Without rituals of manhood, which bring men gradually, but definitively, into modes of responsibility both positional and spiritual, the shift from bachelorhood to parenthood produces anxiety and shock. 

A highly technologized, ultra-modernized world where everyone lives far from nature, tradition, and religion, is one with more choices, and concealed preferences. So my point here is not to punish those who choose not to have children, but to inject some kind of paranoid philosophizing into the conversation. Are we forgetting that we have a choice — and that both tradition and biology make a very powerful case for fatherhood? 

Some, yes, are meant to be monks, playboys, philosophers, esoteric computer programmers who spend their lives in largely solitary conditions. But those are few. How many of us are really Leopold Bloom without wives and without children — without a hero’s journey, without the inheritance of Odysseus, who knows who he is because he has an island home, a wife and a son, an old father, a loyal dog? Many of us. Which means, ultimately, that many of us will never experience the sweetness of growing old.

The interview with Komisar has accumulated 3.5 million views on YouTube, and clips of her regularly circulate on Instagram and TikTok. She was even on a recent episode of The Kardashians. Online mom groups are full of discussion about her. “I’ve seen snippets of her before and she increases my mom guilt 1000%. She shames parents without considering that we’re all just trying our best,” wrote a representative poster on the Reddit r/workingmoms forum. “Most women work because they have to, FFS,” a Mumsnet user wrote. “They don’t have the option of staying at home for 3 years.”

In her 2017 book Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, Komisar is equally blunt about the tradeoffs that she believes must be made: you can’t “have it all” if you have kids as a woman. “You may never be the CEO of the bank or corporate law firm if you choose to make your family your first priority,” she writes. This is a refreshing departure from the message of 2010s girlboss feminism, and it’s easy to see why Being There struck a nerve, published as it was in the heyday of Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer glamorizing non-stop corporate achievement in tandem with motherhood. Komisar acknowledges reality. And her argument doesn’t overtly push a particular political agenda. Nearly everyone would agree with her that motherhood has been devalued in modern society and should be treated like the valuable vocation it is, and that mothers are incredibly important to young children. Her desire for women to have access to longer maternity leaves is sensible and uncontroversial.

But when it comes to the kind of mothering Komisar promotes, Being There is political. The ideal that she describes is a kind of hostage situation. For Komisar, staying home is not enough; you must be wholly focused on your child at every single moment. No scrolling on your phone while breastfeeding. No chores while you’re with your child. “If you are doing the dishes and talking to your child, or cleaning while talking to your child, you are not being present, you’re distracted,” she writes. Playing with your baby is a critical opportunity for optimal parenting. “You need to focus on eye contact, touch, your tone of voice, facial expression, body language, and awareness of your own mood and emotions,” she writes. The baby will “mourn” you if you aren’t there for any length of time. If you need any help, the baby’s father is an acceptable short-term substitute, or another relative. If you really must, a nanny. Komisar has said in interviews that babies “feel like you have died” when they are sent to daycare.

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This is the kind of constant vigilance promoted by the attachment parenting movement, which advises maximum responsiveness and proximity in childrearing. It is rooted in attachment theory, which originates in Fifties and Sixties research that showed the crucial impact on development of infants’ bonds with their primary caregivers. American pediatrician William Sears borrowed the label in coining the term “attachment parenting” to describe his core recommendations of co-sleeping, extended breastfeeding and babywearing. He discourages parents from using strollers and describes babies sleeping in cribs as being “behind bars”. Sears’ books have been bestsellers. He was the subject of a 2012 Time magazine profile that ran with a cover photo of a mother breastfeeding a three-year-old that set off a fierce media uproar at the time.

Time was covering the movement as a curious new trend, but since then it has become hugely influential in parenting culture. Its connection to a legitimate branch of psychological research gives attachment parenting a science-y sheen that attracts educated women who want to do everything possible to optimize their children’s development. There’s a lot of talk in these circles about cortisol levels and whether things are “biologically normal”.

Alongside its cousin “gentle parenting”, which discourages traditional methods of discipline like time-outs or saying no, attachment parenting has taken off in the social media era. Like with anything else, this has much to do with the algorithms’ inexorable push towards extremes. On parenting TikTok and Instagram there is an arms race underway for who can be the most responsive, the gentlest, the most self-sacrificing. One of the main battlegrounds these days is sleep. Advocates of co-sleeping commonly equate sleep training to child abuse. “In this group we do not tolerate Ferber method, CIO, or any forms of sleep training,” read the rules for a 12,000-member attachment parenting Facebook group. “It is cruel and not biologically normal. Infant sleep is developmental and you cannot train a baby to not need you.” The group also forbids any discussion of weaning. When followed to the hilt, this type of parenting — and really it should be “attachment mothering”, since fathers play a supporting role at best — is a totalizing endeavor that leaves no room for anything else.

These intensive parenting philosophies succeed where conservative arguments rooted in tradition or religion do not in persuading professional-class women that they must sacrifice everything for motherhood. Women who might have “leaned in” 10 years ago are now applying that anxiety and perfectionism to childrearing, fearful of traumatizing their child because they let them cry for five minutes. While apolitical and science-based in theory, attachment parenting results in practice in the gender roles sought by traditional conservatives; it has thus become a vehicle for a retrograde brand of gender politics to make inroads in unexpected quarters. Mothers who follow these parenting styles might not themselves be trads — but they often end up in the same place the trads envision, bound to the home and detached from the public sphere.

Most “mommy wars” skirmishes stay contained to parenting forums and comment sections, but the issue of group childcare has within the last half-decade entered the heart of political discourse. Expanding access to it has become a signature policy of Anglosphere liberals. Zohran Mamdani just won the mayoralty of New York City on a platform that included universal childcare, modeled after a recent successful statewide initiative in New Mexico. In the UK, the Labour government increased the number of free childcare hours available to qualifying families this autumn. Australia’s Labor government has been designing a universal childcare plan it has said it seeks to unveil next year. Proponents of these projects point to data about increased labor participation and alleviated economic pressure on working families. In a society where more and more people say they can’t afford to have kids, lightening the burden of paying for childcare seems like a sensible policy.

But its critics are many, especially in the US. On the Right, the idea is seen as a bourgeois priority of coastal liberals who selfishly want to pursue careers instead of family. “‘Universal child care’ is a massive subsidy to the lifestyle preferences of the affluent over the preferences of the middle and working class,” Vice President JD Vance tweeted in 2021 while still in the Senate. He called it “terrible for children” on another occasion. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy wish list called for shifting government funding to in-home childcare or to pay stay-at-home parents and for ending the federal Head Start low-income early childhood education program. A recent leaked Heritage position paper titled “We Must Save The American Family” calls for a “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family” by incentivizing couples to have one partner stay at home to raise the kids.

This is the backdrop against which Komisar’s anti-daycare position has gained steam. The Right have already begun to instrumentalize attachment parenting, correctly observing that its arguments resonate with mothers choosing whether to stay home or not. Komisar for example, despite her apolitical presentation, is affiliated with the conservative Institute for Family Studies and speaks at Right-leaning conferences. Dr Sears appeared this year on conservative activist Lila Rose’s YouTube show. And the MAGA movement has embraced “crunchy moms”, a group that tend to be vocal in their embrace of attachment parenting practices.

The irony is that this type of all-consuming mothering isn’t traditional at all. I doubt there has been any time in history when women stared into their newborn’s eyes during the entirety of the dozen daily feeds or refrained from housework in order to focus on their children’s enrichment. Women may have not always had careers, but they have always worked. Even the concept of daycare isn’t particularly new; the US opened federally-funded daycares during the Second World War for the mothers who were working as the men fought overseas. But it has come to be seen as a harmful modern innovation. Of course the quality of a daycare matters, and the amount of time a child spends there. No one thinks that it’s desirable for six-week-olds to enter daycare — a sad reality that some American families are forced into because of paltry parental leave protections.

But the fear-mongering about daycare and the growing demands on mothers to be absolutely everything for their children has turned the conversation into a zero-sum game in which women will lose. It is here that the Right has made a tactical error. If falling birthrates are a crisis and convincing women to have children is a priority, it is perhaps not the smartest move to portray motherhood as an act of complete self-effacement that makes work impossible. It’s no wonder that, when faced with this, many young women are opting out entirely.

Yet Tough, throughout the article, and in later remarks in an interview with Adam B. Kushner for his morning newsletter for The New York Times, is reluctant to reach his own conclusions, and presents the material in carefully couched language such as “most researchers I spoke with believe that stimulant medications are, on the whole, a positive thing for children with ADHD.” And: “most scientists I spoke to agreed that the condition is produced by some combination of biological and environmental forces.”

This kind of hedging is understandable given the sensitivity of the topic for the families involved, and it accurately reflects the medical rhetoric, though not the science. Scientists can believe and agree to all kinds of things that aren’t based on evidence. And they have a powerful incentives to do so — institutional inertia, the difficulty of speaking out against a popular consensus, and the financial interests of their institutions and the pharmaceutical companies, to name just a few. However, if we want to slow the flood of pills — and, most important, help American schoolchildren, especially boys — we must fight the tendency to temporize.

Tough is the author of several books on education and child development, and is a meticulous researcher and long-form feature writer of the highest professional standing. He spent a year compiling the story, which is worth reading in full, and which appears to represent the most reputable, thorough, and mainstream analysis of today’s science. In it, he documents a situation that most American families are aware of — an explosion in ADHD diagnoses, which last year spiked to 11.5% (or 7 million kids), up from about 3% (or 2 million kids) in 1993.

Of those diagnosed, a disproportionate share are boys: 21% of 14-year-old boys and 23 percent of 17-year-old boys officially have ADHD, according to 2024 figures. The actual number displaying the collection of symptoms associated with ADHD is probably much higher, given that not all families pursue a formal diagnosis. Tough does not provide hard numbers on what percentage of those diagnosed are taking prescription stimulants such as Ritalin or Adderall, but says that it’s the “preferred” treatment.

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Most Americans aren’t aware, however, of the sketchiness of the underlying science — which has always seemed pretty obvious to dissenters, but has now been conclusively demonstrated. The field started, Tough says, with an observation, made by a Harvard-trained psychiatrist in 1937, and since very widely replicated, that giving amphetamines to children classified as having behavioral problems has the “spectacular” effect of getting them to sit down and stay cheerfully focused on a task. Skeptics have pointed out that stimulants do that to everyone, and are popular precisely with people who wish to get through boring tasks more pleasantly (long-distance truckers, Fifties housewives, every college student unprepared for an exam).

Nonetheless, the ideas that the source of the children’s noncompliant behavior might be a physical deficit, and that the drug might correct it, has been compelling. Since the Nineties, massive amounts of research has gone into proving this attractive proposition by looking for a biomarker for ADHD (such as a gene or a correlation such as “less brain electrical activity”) and scientifically demonstrating the benefits of the treatment.

Initial results were promising, Tough writes. The Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, launched in the early Nineties and funded by National Institute of Mental Health, was “one of the largest studies ever undertaken of the long-term effects of any psychiatric medication.” In 1999, the researchers announced early results that Ritalin, their stimulant of choice, produced “significantly fewer symptoms” in children with ADHD after 14 months, compared to comparison groups of ADHD kids receiving only behavioral training or no interventions at all.

In 2017, in an effort to find a biomarker, an analysis of brain scans performed by the Enigma Consortium, a global network of scientists, announced that “patients with ADHD have altered brains; therefore ADHD is a disorder of the brain.” This was the “most ambitious” project to date, per Tough. However, his more recent conversations with the scientists who participated in those projects reveal a different story.

The brain-scan differences, he says, were either nonexistent among adults or “so minor as to be almost imperceptible” among children. Martine Hoogman, a Dutch neuroscientist who led the Enigma team, wrote to Tough in an email: “‘Back then, we emphasized the differences that we found (although small), but you can also conclude that the subcortical and cortical volumes of people with ADHD and those without ADHD are almost identical.…’ In retrospect, she added, it wasn’t fitting to conclude from her findings that A.D.H.D. is a brain disorder.”

As time passed, the MTA began to turn up different results. By 36 months on stimulants, improvements in children’s behavior had disappeared — in fact, children in all three groups demonstrated “exactly the same” level of symptoms. Moreover, careful observation of the children in question revealed a diagnosis in flux. As later studies have shown, sometimes they seemed to have ADHD, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes children in a comparison group — who didn’t have it at the study’s outset — developed it. Tough quotes Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London, as saying that “the traditional notion that there is a natural category of ‘people with ADHD’ that clinicians can objectively measure and define ‘just doesn’t seem to be the case.’”

At the same time, situational explanations for the behaviors have seemed to grow in significance. A 2016 study published by researcher Arielle Lasky and members of the MTA group, Tough writes, interviewed adults in their mid-20s who had participated in the study as children. “Subject after subject spontaneously brought up the importance of finding their ‘niche,’ or the right ‘fit,’ in school or in the workplace,” he says. When the subjects found pursuits that were more interesting to them than school had been, their symptoms disappeared. Given such results and the difficulties of finding a biological cause, Sonuga-Barke proposes that we view ADHD not as a medical problem, but one of “misalignment” between what he tactfully calls “a child’s biological makeup” — but could also easily be called a child’s personality and situation in life — and “the environment in which they are trying to function.”

More disturbing information has come out as well. The MTA study found that after 36 months, children in the group taking Ritalin were on average one inch shorter than children in the control groups, and that the height lost was not made up later — they were still shorter as adults. And last year, a study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry found that even a medium-strength daily dose of Adderall more than tripled a patient’s likelihood of developing psychosis or mania.

Several studies have also debunked the appealing assumption that better classroom behavior actually translates to better learning. Children work faster and behave better, but Tough’s conclusions are mostly reflected by the words of F. Xavier Castellanos, a neuroscience researcher at New York University, whom he quotes: “There’s a real disconnect between the almost awesome effects on behavior and the minimal effects on academic achievement or attainment.” A 2023 study on adults found subjects’ strategies for problem-solving became “significantly worse under the medication.” It shouldn’t take a neuroscientist: Most people with any experience with recreational drugs in this category have noticed the same effect.

So why is the overall consensus, as Tough represents it, still so gentle in taking on the status quo? Why do the researchers still believe or agree that the medications are beneficial? And why does someone as smart as Tough introduce paragraphs with careful sentences such as “the failure to find a clear biomarker doesn’t mean that there is no biological basis for ADHD”?

In most human affairs, the burden of proof is on those arguing for something; we aren’t required to prove a negative to move on from a bad idea. Sonuga-Barke theorizes that research priorities have been distorted by the urgency of the children’s distress and the families’ needs for a solution. “In the field, we’re so frightened that people will say it doesn’t exist,” he told Tough, referring specifically to the quest for the biomarker. “We have to double down because we’re terrified of what will happen to the kids who can’t get the meds. We’ve seen the impact they can have on people’s lives.”

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There is, however, urgency to a change of direction. For one thing, doctors who “believe” that stimulant medications are “on the whole, a positive thing” are unlikely to arm families with the information they need to make fully informed choices about their child’s health. The obfuscating language in Tough’s story surely is being replicated throughout the medical establishment. As James Swanson, a research psychologist who worked on the initial MTA study, told Tough, “If you’re honest, you should tell kids that, look, if you’re interested in next week or next month or even the next year, this is the right treatment for you. But in the long run, you’re going to be shorter. How many kids would agree to take medication? Probably none.”

And for another, the situation looks very different when you admit that the problem is not a physical deficit of some kind, but something afflicting a large share of children and, by my guess, most teenage boys. Diagnosing and possibly medicating these kids may get them through a bad time more successfully — it’s clearly a lifeline for many struggling families — but it does nothing to prevent the problem from arising, or to help the kids learn.

In his book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, which analyzes debunked science crazes in illuminating detail, the journalist Jesse Singal discovered that “at root, when society accepts a false story, it’s often because that story tells society something it wants to hear.” He also observes that it’s a pattern for junk science to be taken up when it provides “an easy way out” of a complicated problem.

In this light, we might conclude that ADHD has been an easy way to address (or not address) the vastly complicated problem that contemporary school is unsuited to the needs of a large percentage of the child population, especially boys, and desperately needs reform. We might target our attention on the long, physically confining days; the constant usage of attention-shattering screens; the stultifying conformity; the chaos-promoting soft-discipline; and the deeper questions, exacerbated by AI, of what any of it is doing and what it’s for.

Or we might target other things. But to target anything, we have to move the blame off the kids, where it never should have been in the first place. Our children’s bodies and personalities are not deficient. We are.

Be honest: you’re filled with uneasy loathing at the sight of expensively dressed adults bored together on the morning playground, or by the sound of the patient-voice as gentle-parenting Mommy explains something, or when you cross paths with the attractive woman virtuously biking along with her cute kid in a big child seat on the front of the bike, as I did in Brooklyn this week. What’s repulsive is the combination of upper-middle-class safety-ism and faux-spontaneity: kids rocking their supposed individuality with wild hair, a year-round Halloween costume or Daddy’s favorite-band T-shirt.

A new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, by the cultural critic and social historian Hannah Zeavin, provides some striking context for the phenomenon by examining one of the most significant changes in modern parenting: the unprecedented penetration of media and technology into the American home.

Author and the book are both scholarly, focusing not on the great issues of the modern era, such as how much screen time is too much, and how to protect your children from porn — but on the underlying cultural and social structures that govern our relationship to parenting and technology. She focuses on a transformation that crystallized in the Fifties, when mothers, she says, became “media” — meaning, they started being viewed as a kind of dehumanized, information-bearing “technology” that could influence the child, for good and ill, and which required expert and scientific intervention to regulate. If “mother” and “media” are the same, Zeavin proposes, a comparative discourse will be illuminating.

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And so it is. Zeavin argues that the mother was originally a networked figure who might have been aided by a wet-nurse or servant. But with the rise of new labor-saving technologies and the demographic shift to the nuclear family, she became an isolated individual, concerned about dangerous outside influences on her family, and feeling pressure to do everything herself.

Zeavin illustrates such changes by analyzing the marketing for such items as an early “smart house” or a baby monitor made by Zenith and displayed in the Whitney Museum in 1939. What she finds is a vicious cycle — the technologies replace human labor, allegedly creating a safer and “purer” home fully controlled by a liberated mother. But the emphasis on purity makes both mother and technology suspect, blurring them together and fueling panics that can only be assuaged by more technology and more mothering.

In this reading, panics are really “about” family purity. Take the Satanic Panic of the Eighties, which cast suspicion on childcare workers as Satanists or possibly cannibals. Or Shaken Baby Syndrome, also a demonization of both mothers and childcare workers, now largely debunked. Such episodes serve to usher in new technologies such as nanny cams hidden in teddy bears. They also put ongoing pressure on women to perform intensive one-on-one parenting to protect their children from the imagined danger.

Zeavin is more concerned with the past, but a present example of such a panic might be the scandals that erupt from time to time about the iPhone babysitter. (For anyone unfamiliar with this trick, you establish a call between two parents’ phones, leave one in the room with your sleeping child, and go out nearby with the other one; it works like a long-distance baby monitor.) When TikTok influencers Matt and Abby Howard posted about doing this while having dinner on a cruise in 2024, all hell broke loose online. Other parents have been arrested for the practice. Whether it’s actually illegal or even dangerous seems unclear, but the hysterical character of the debate fits with Zeavin’s theory.

Mother Media draws many conclusions, but one is that the abstract demand that a mother be a kind of protection-and-surveillance machine for her child sets her running on the treadmill of purity and contamination, requiring her to be “infinitely rechargeable and always on”. I am a mother in this demographic, and I find the representation compelling — if I were a robot who didn’t need sleep, my life would be much more manageable.

The book is also especially interesting when she addresses the wider purity-and-danger issues we’re all now routinely responsible for, such as providing our children with organic food, vaccinating them (or protecting them from vaccines), policing environmental toxins, and, of course, guarding kids against technology itself. The best mothers, supposedly, have screen-free kids and wooden toys. The ‘best’ mothers also now track their child’s location through their phone and practice surveillance of their text messages and social media, a development that seems ripe for further analysis.

The book is less convincing, however, in its attempt to target the nuclear family as the source of the problem. Zeavin approaches the subject from a typical Left-feminist perspective, and another thrust of her argument is that “motherhood is a white bourgeois concept” that depends for its existence on the “carceral system” oppressing people of color. This argument works well enough within Zeavin’s parameters. But it leaves too much out — what is nonwhite, non-bourgeois motherhood, for example? All those low-income mothers of color are doing something, and surely they’d call themselves mothers. And it also seems to rely on a slight of hand between the ideal and reality.

What Zeavin calls “the exceptionalness of the family at midcentury” doesn’t make families, in reality, exceptional. Parents and their offspring of all races and social demographics have been a fundamental building block of households since long before the 20th century; neither they nor their “privatization” is really new. The monogamous two-parent family — arguably the most private arrangement of all — has been the standard in Western culture at least since Christendom. And the urge to split off into smaller and more autonomous dwellings has been a force in Western social development since premodernity.

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Other cultures may arrange things slightly differently, but to suggest that these practices erase the “possessive” parent-child bond or the family as a unit is its own form of idealization. If a toxic ideology has grown up around the nuclear family — which is only part of its story, anyway, or one theory of it — we must look elsewhere for the explanation of society’s ills. Perhaps to the actual new thing: the technology.

I suspect Zeavin’s various ideological commitments render her silent on another point that seems worthy of discussion. The transformation to mother-as-media requires a transformation from something — and she’s awfully quiet about what that might have been. We mostly have to extrapolate that motherhood was less intensive previously, less sentimentalized. Families were more likely to employ servants or live in intergenerational homes. And we don’t learn how non-Western societies parent differently, in the past or now. These are urgent questions if we want to stop the treadmill.

I’d propose that while there are many families that look ugly — the hovering parents on the playground, the child contained in the giant, almost comical wooden-purity-box — there are ones that look beautiful, too. Usually, the ones that make your heart ache or make you wish you had more kids are those manifesting a kind of visible care for the children, not in a superficial way, but in a real one. Panic and anxiety-driven behaviors aren’t the same thing, and it’s palpable. At the same time, modern parenting is full of new and real dangers, from the effects of screens to the flood of porn. Responding, somehow, with an openness to impurity, ideological and otherwise, is the best idea I’ve heard yet.

The particular site I haunted was small, cliquey, and dwarfed even then by the behemoth that is Mumsnet — the motherlode of mother chat, 25 years old this very month. What started off in 2000 as a tiny website, conceived of by founder Justine Roberts as a place to swap tips about vacations and strollers, is now the sort of outfit that can make or break commercial or even political fortunes.

Every month, millions of users ignore the boring articles on the front page and head straight to the “talk” bit: to learn, laugh, vent, and gawp at the incredible state of other people’s marriages. All female life is on Mumsnet: shooting the breeze, recommending products, worrying a lot, talking politics, judging other people’s parenting from a great height, discussing weight loss, and laughing at the unfortunate lady whose husband once ate some Bombay Mix, then tried to give her oral.

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Occasionally, men are to be found on Mumsnet too, the weirdos. They should probably be made to do a land acknowledgment. For, despite the ecumenical pretensions to being “by parents for parents”, in essence it is still a woman’s world. It has its own complicated rules, mythologies, social hierarchies, and culture. It even has a language: where else can an OP get a YANBU about that CF, DH, not wanting to SWI during your EWCM phase when all you can think about is getting a BFP?

Never has the wisdom of crowds been so hard to interpret. Eventually you get your ear in, though. My active chatting days on forums are long gone, but I still use Mumsnet for reassurance whenever I or someone close to me has unexplained health symptoms. Simply put whatever physical glitch you are worried about into the search bar, add “Mumsnet”, and find a thread by someone who had roughly the same thing.

There, in the answers, you will find an efficient distillation of at least 10 doctors’ opinions on your symptoms, filtered through the intensely detail-oriented scrutiny of hypochondriac posters who took the very same problem straight to A&E. Discount the answers from the most obviously crazy people, read the rest, and start to breathe again, reassured you probably won’t die anytime soon — at least, until you reach the bottom of the thread and realize the OP never came back.

The odd bit of dilettante lurking is a far cry from my enthusiastic levels of engagement back in the 2000s. I first found my own preferred site when I was newly pregnant, body fizzy with hormones, thrilled and intimidated by what was to come. The front page — a list of questions and exclamations by people with daft made-up names — seemed incomprehensible. Clicking on what I would later learn were called “threads”, I mentally approached each as if I was reading a static text, wondering why anyone would bother recording this ephemera for posterity.

But then came the gestalt switch, a moment of exhilaration I still remember from my current position as a jaded net aficionado. I pressed “refresh”. All the headings changed. I pressed again, and they changed again. The penny dropped: it was updating in real time. Women across the UK were chatting about their lives here under the guise of anonymity. And I could look in, voyeuristically. A few months later, I chose my codename — a very funny one I’d love to tell you about, except that nothing ever dies on the internet — and started to post too. My second life had begun.

For a while, I was quite obsessed, though that could have been the hormones. Because of its small size, being on this forum was a bit like being back at school; except that the cool kids who ran the place were those that were clever and good at writing, which made it very unlike the school I had actually attended. Here, too, there were the equivalents of prefects, rebels, teacher’s pets, sad losers and perpetual comedians. Indeed, as if at a virtual St Trinian’s, our more anarchic members would sometimes daringly embark on what were known as “panty raids” to a still-young Mumsnet to try to stir up trouble there.

As well as larking about, there was a lot of histrionics. “Flounces” were legion, though much mocked. I am sure I indulged in a flounce or two myself — after all, it’s quite easy to get annoyed at strangers on the internet, it turns out. And it was there that I first experienced the hypnotic pull of stripping yourself down to just a name and some sentences: no physical presence or inadvertent gestures for others to gauge the meaning of, but only your words.

Many births were celebrated — including both of mine — and a couple of very sad deaths were mourned. There was a lot of drunken TMI, several blood feuds, and the vastly entertaining presence of some total fantasists. At one point, a regular poster with a useless husband, new baby, and post-natal depression was dramatically unmasked as having none of these things, despite friends on the site having just sent her baby clothes. One of my mates had even just talked to her for hours on the phone, with the sound of her fake baby crying in the background. It is a wonder my own small children survived this period, so gripped was I by the daily melodrama.

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By Marilyn Simon

Obviously, part of the appeal of these places is that contact is all virtual. Being stuck in a room with your favorite internet characters is less fun than you might imagine — and I don’t have to imagine, because I used to go on forum meets. All the things that make huge gatherings of women hell in person — gushing insincerity, rivalry, passive-aggression, a lack of healthy boundaries, etc — are dialed down a bit, or at least are safely corralled on the other side of your screen. Meanwhile, the fun and life-enhancing bits of female companionship remain to be enjoyed at a distance: common sense, empathy, righteous outrage, campy irreverence, gossip. There is an energy and lightness in social interactions on Mumsnet which you could never get on a male-dominated forum. Quite simply, we were born for this social media stuff.

Perhaps not surprising, then, that Mumsnet has also played a major role in cementing the status of Terf island. If there is one thing I know for sure about transactivists, it’s that lightness and wit are not their forte. In this arena, angry envious men typing insults or shouting mantras just don’t stand a chance; they might as well pack up their laptops and go home to their basements. And anyway, childish emotional blackmail doesn’t tend to work on moms. Not to mention that it’s hard to pretend that human biology is a flexible state of mind, when you’ve just heaved a baby out of your bleeding body and now have to feed it.

The forum I loved the most closed a good few years back, sucked into the huge gravitational pull of Mumsnet and eventually consumed. I’m still in a WhatsApp group with a handful of former members, though the kids we used to ask each other worried questions about are now grown up, and some of them have children of their own. But every now and again my phone will light up as of old, and I will shoot the breeze with Skirt, Chels, Howdie, and Joan of Argos, a grin on my face as I scroll, type, and PMSL. Last night we were discussing a face powder we are all getting ads for: Howdie had bought it already, I found myself bizarrely tempted, and Skirt decided it would make her look like a pharaoh. AIBU to think, when so much else on the internet is dark and sordid, online friendships between moms are a wonderful thing? IMHO they really are.

In the Times, correspondent Ben Hoyle wrote that going to the concert with his wife and children had acted as a bonding experience for the family, during which he realised “he couldn’t be happier”. An accompanying picture showed him resplendent in a hot pink feather boa, which he said had been urged upon him by his teenage daughters. Meanwhile, in the Mail on Sunday Bryony Gordon recounted the story of what was, for both her and her 11-year-old, “the best night of our lives — and made all the more magical for getting to enjoy it together”.  According to Gordon, the concert had “united the generations in sparklingly spectacular glory”.

Less cynical minds than mine probably read this stuff with approval. Assuming that parents and children are increasingly mutually alienated, lost in different online worlds, isn’t it refreshing to read about a relatively innocent communal activity taking place in the open air? But I’m afraid I’m going to be the voice of doom. If you want that sort of thing, do a Parkrun together. In my ideal world, adults would get their vampiric mitts off young people’s music and leave them to it.

Reality is not ideal, however; and I’m as guilty as the next Gen X-er of having a Spotify playlist that ill behoves my advancing years. In fact, with my own kids, it is as if the poles have reversed — when my 18-year-old tells me he has an “absolute banger” he wants me to listen to, more often than not it’s by Fats Waller. It’s all a far cry from the late 20th century, where an informal social contract still existed between teenagers and their parents, dictating that the right and proper attitude towards the other party’s music should be suspicion bordering upon downright contempt.

Youngsters could feel rebellious in virtue of whatever fresh aural hell was emitting from turntables and tape recorders, while adults in the vicinity would mutter gratifyingly about the culturally impenetrable noise. Concerts and raves were places for older kids to engage in Dionysian excess — dancing, moshing, screaming, crying, snogging, crowdsurfing, ingesting stimulants, and acquiring eardrum injuries — as their parents worried about them impotently, far removed from the action.

But then the mobile phone came along, spoiling live music in a number of ways — and not just because now, at emotionally charged moments, you had to wave your phone torch aloft instead of a lighter. Soon, certain brains would automatically translate nascent feelings of excitement into an imperative to film something; to adopt a shrewd directorial eye towards incoming sensory experience, treating it as a product to be sold on later to others. This also meant it was no longer possible to dance like no one was watching. Another result was that now young people were never very far away from their parents, psychologically speaking — only a call away, in fact, which seems at some point in the 2010s to have morphed into “only a few feet away” instead.

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Lana Del Rey's dissident femininity

By Kathleen Stock

Nowadays, there is much talk about helicopter parenting, but in the case of music, the metaphor should probably be that of a grasping hook — though one which steals nice things from teenage girls not boys, since the latter still seem able to go to rap and rock gigs without chaperoning. The main site of familial musical appreciation is commercial pop music like Swift’s: consumed by vastly more females than males, and scarcely much of a prospect for adolescent defiance anyway, either in terms of decibel level or parental advisory warnings. Instead, what pop music does best is give visceral melodic form to desperate feelings of love and heartbreak, topics very close to young hearts. Doubtless such themes are perennial. Still, when you are belting out a ballad along with your idol, pouring forth all that rejection and self-doubt like an exorcism, do you really want to hear your mother singing it too?

That music has become so horribly inclusive is not entirely the fault of us oldies, though. As others have noted, largely thanks to internet streaming we seem to have arrived at the doldrums phase of musical history: stuck in an eternal present with no forward momentum. All musical periods are available all the time, and artists — even great ones like Swift — don’t so much create new styles as put old ones in quotation marks. It’s also impossible for youth subcultures to get going in quite the same way, since an infinity of choice atomises listeners.

Globally, there might be lots of fans of a particular act, but locally there are unlikely to be enough to feel part of something meaningful. And even when you stumble across something you love, there’s a relative lack of physical objects in which to ground the intense feeling: fewer records and CDs, music venues and record shops; no weekly music papers to pore over; virtual fandoms rather than organised fan clubs. Sounds float weightlessly, easily accessed and more easily lost. Megastars like Swift, capable of filling stadiums and shifting merch at scale, hoover up the surplus adoration.

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Though it sounds fogeyish to say it, musical quality has also definitely deteriorated, as record companies aim for whatever is most likely to achieve virality on TikTok. Songs are getting shorter and also simpler, lyrically and melodically; the album format is dying; the “loudness war” continues, reducing aural dynamics; human composition and performance are now indistinguishable from AI. New bands make practically no money from streaming and can’t afford to tour. Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that this year’s festivals include headliners whose heydays were decades ago: Coldplay at Glastonbury; Pet Shop Boys at the Isle of Wight; Liam Gallagher and Blink 182 at Leeds and Reading.

Some may protest that great tunes speak to everyone; and anyway, the absence of aesthetic boundaries between family members is not all bad. Given the state of the housing market, you will probably all be living together forever anyway — so why not lean into the psychic enmeshment? At least that way you won’t be fighting over what comes out of the speakers.

Still, I suspect the lack of generational differentiation — musical or otherwise — has a cost. In a reboot of The Picture of Dorian Gray, as adults refuse to grow up, Gen Z-ers seem to get ever more straight-faced and anhedonic in compensation. Booze and sex are out, apparently; antidepressants and staycations in the Cotswolds are in. It’s as if they are desperate to make a psychic break with older generations, and have concluded that moderation, responsibility, and excessive worry about the future are their only options. Every time a political leader arses about on a waterslide, a 20-something on Love Island gets enough facial fillers to make her look like a Milf.

A perhaps healthier means of mentally detaching from your elders — and perhaps of getting a bit of revenge too — is by featuring them in your social media content, in order to make them look endearingly foolish and pet-like. That seems to be what 24-year-old Francesca Scorsese, daughter of film director Martin, has been doing for a while now: getting her famous and apparently compliant 81-year-old father to pronounce upon the function of various “feminine items” of hers, or otherwise clown around, then putting the outputs to ironic music. A recent TikTok trend which also mines the narcissistic tendencies of parents involves getting them to dance to Bronski Beat like they “would have danced in the 80s” and then filming the results.

Parents might think they look cutely uninhibited, but the kids are presumably watching a whole different show. After all, “cool” is an attributive adjective, changing its standards of application relative to context. Just as a “large” mouse still looks small next to an elephant, a “cool” parent — at least in the eyes of other parents — can still be a source of high mirth or mortification to subsequent generations.

It’s almost enough to give the unselfconscious concert-going mum and dad a dose of paranoia. While you were uploading those happy family selfies for Instagram, who knows what your darling offspring were posting about you on Snapchat? Maybe next time, instead of playing the glitter-strewn ghost at the feast, try to restore the natural order of things: drop them off at the venue if you must, but with the parting shot that whatever they are about to hear is a load of rubbish. And then go and take selfies at a National Trust property instead.

I’d love to tell you, except that a lack of sleep during significant periods of the past 18 years seems to have prevented the laying down of long-term memories. What I can do, however, is compare having a young child now to what I vaguely remember of my time in the trenches in the 2000s. Some things are the same — the joy of first smiles, the food embedded into the cracks of the highchair, the assault on your fragile, sleep-deprived immune system as a walking germ bomb coughs delightedly in your face — but others are very different.

One thing that’s obviously changed is the tech. There’s an app for everything: meeting other mums; tracking sleeping, feeding, defecating (theirs) and alcohol consumption (yours); enticing you to buy products out of FOBMO (Fear Of Baby Missing Out), and then helping you to sell them on to other poor saps in an environmentally conscious manner once you’ve realised that they’re pointless.

There’s an app that monitors “tummy time”, an apparent obsession of modern new mothers which I swear did not even come up once 18 years ago. There’s another that tells you about developmental “leaps” and what unusual behaviour to expect when one happens (cue lots of anxious reassurance-seeking between parents: “do you think she might be leaping at the moment? I definitely think she must be leaping…”). And you can also use your phone to complain to your mum mates and make playdates, construct lullaby playlists, connect a night light to the WiFi, doomscroll childhood diseases, and replicate hairdryer white noise in order to mimic womb sounds. I have no idea how I managed to bring my first two kids up without a smartphone, though I do have dim memories of standing in a daze over a cot holding an actual hairdryer.

The kit has been updated too. New purchasing trends ripple round the motherworld faster than you can open up Instagram. Baby monitors have nightvision as well as sound; bath toy ducks have thermometers built in; crawling can even be enhanced with anti-slip kneepads. A recent addition to our house has been a “travel carry potty”: roughly, a suitcase decorated in the shape of a friendly penguin for a toddler to carry about, then open up and sit upon whenever nature calls. As a suitably environmentally conscious citizen, I could not have predicted that encouraging kids to quite literally take a shit on an endangered icon of the natural world would become so widely sanctioned —but it seems that here, yet again, the zeitgeist is moving way too fast for me.

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Stop blaming parents for everything

By Ashley Frawley

The cast of experts is also impermanent, along with their advice. When I first had my babies, someone called Gina Ford was the authority of the moment, insisting on an exactly timed rotation of sleeping and feeding throughout the day, and advocating reduced cuddling and “controlled crying” in the evenings.  Though I personally didn’t have the inner steel to see this through, one mother I knew used to take her naked sleeping baby out into the garden to wake him if he passed the time allotted for a daytime nap. For older kids, back then the behavioural expert du jour was the equally strict Supernanny, a very watchable TV expert called Jo Frost who was fond of boundaries, princess reward charts and naughty steps, and famously prone to telling both children and their shamefaced parents that their behaviour was “unasseptable”.

If Ford and Frost sound like Victorian throwbacks, they are in fact pushovers compared to the guru my grandmother followed in the Thirties — a terrifying figure from New Zealand called Dr Truby King who advocated leaving a young baby alone all night, unfed and uncomforted, and held that cuddling should not exceed 10 minutes per day. These days — thank God — parents are encouraged to be much softer and more intuitive, with “gentle” being a big buzzword. The Gentle Sleep Solution is a popular book and “gentle parenting” has been on people’s lips for a while, described on one website as “a parenting approach that encourages a partnership between you and your child to make choices based on an internal willingness instead of external pressures”.

Basically: you remain endlessly patient; talk over every emotion of theirs and every decision of yours; give them lots of choices so they feel in control; and eventually produce neurotic mini-despots with huge emotional vocabularies, tailor-made for success in the modern world. Being a big fan of the “because I say so” method, I find this degree of parental pusillanimity incomprehensible — but in any case, there are signs that it too might be on the way out. The New Yorker, no less, has expressed doubts; and this week a confessional article appeared in The Cut, relating how gentle parenting was — surprise, surprise — in fact leaving parents resentful and depleted.

There’s a school of thought, increasing in popularity, which says that parents have become too anxious about their children, and about how to parent generally, and that it’s harming children psychologically. Most prominently, Jonathan Haidt has made a connection between overanxious, perpetually hovering parents and rising problems with mental health in young people. I’m certainly sympathetic to the argument recently offered by Ashley Frawley that if such a link is established, it’s the fault of the experts not the parents, who have been positively encouraging the latter to think of themselves as de-skilled in the upbringing of their offspring for decades. But still, I also don’t think there is any going back now.

Over generations, know-how in parenting — in the sense of relatively intuitive skills, passed on by direct observation and emulation of others around you plus a lot of practice — has been replaced with “knowing-that”: technical, relatively abstract rules that we first read or hear about and only then try to put into practice, more or less imperfectly, until the next set of instructions comes along. As conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott might have said if he were talking about parenting not politics, practical skill has been hollowed out by rationalist technique. So now, even if a parent deliberately tries hard to be less anxious, and to hover less, she is still in the realm of self-consciously adopted technique not skill. At most, “not listening to experts” is now becoming a conscious technique too, only as secure as its endorsement by whoever the new experts-about-experts are deemed to be.

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George Santos is no Gatsby

By Kathleen Stock

Partly, this situation is a product of an overload of information via the internet, distance between generations, reduced family sizes, and the fact that many of us don’t know anyone who has children until around the time we ourselves start to procreate. But I also think that the natural facts around motherhood don’t help. (Indeed, it seems significant that the most prominent voices urging parents to be less anxious are men).

For honestly, why wouldn’t a mother be somewhat nervous, risk-averse, and second-guess herself at the slightest insinuation of her own lack of reliable knowledge? Typically, you have carried a child for nine months, invested huge amounts of physical resources in the process relative to the father, and are now centrally implicated in the child’s future prospects for surviving and thriving for years and years to come. You have, almost literally, put your egg in one precious basket. And maternal hypervigilance is arguably in a young child’s interests, adaptively speaking.

Some scientists even speculate that, despite its chilled reputation, increased oxytocin pre and post-partum — otherwise known as the “love hormone” — can make anxiety disorders and OCD in mothers more likely. There’s also research suggesting that listening to your baby’s cry can activate neural networks associated with OCD. When it comes to motherly love and motherly anxiety, then, it can be really quite hard to tell the difference.

Yes, we might hearken back to a supposedly glorious past where mums would let their offspring roam around the woods all day, only calling them in for tea at dusk. But perhaps this is not because these women were particularly relaxed and self-assured about parenting, but rather because family sizes were on average bigger, and because there’s a psychological limit to how much laser-like attention you can focus simultaneously on lots of children before your mind just gives up. Now that family sizes are reducing, maybe the maternal psyche is understandably freed up for (yet) more worrying.

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Stonewall doesn't understand human rights

By Kathleen Stock

In conjunction with capitalism, modern therapeutic discourse simultaneously pathologises anxiety in mothers and passive-aggressively feeds the thing it criticises: are you protecting your child sufficiently from preventable illnesses, or from the wrong school, the wrong friends, the wrong experiences, the wrong products? Are you, indeed, sufficiently protecting her from your problems, including from your own anxiety? One reasonable response to the pressure is indeed to try to ignore it all as best you can, and just do your thing — assuming you have any independent sense of what that thing is.

But another, perhaps more achievable goal is to stop positively trying to get rid of anxiety altogether, and to just accept its permanent presence in your life now; to admit to yourself that, in motherhood, worrying that you are doing the wrong thing has always gone with the territory, and always will. Yes, it’s absolute hell at times — a relentless personal torment, and particularly during crises  — but that’s partly a recognition of your babies’ intense vulnerability and need for you, and of your deep and loving investment in them. Yes, your propensity for anxiety means that you are now perpetually vulnerable to the prompts of other interested parties about what might be going wrong, or what you could be doing better; but it also means you really, really care.

Or at least, that’s what I’ll be saying to myself, the next time my teenager is on a road trip with his mates and my daughter has the croup.

But if, despite all the risks, you find yourself positively longing to find lost genetic relatives, a testing kit may be the way to go. This week, the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority has recommended that the identities of sperm and egg donors be made knowable to recipients from birth, on the grounds that the widespread use of home DNA test kits has made attempts to preserve donor anonymity futile in any case.

Under current law, a donor-conceived young person turning 16 gains the right to discover the height, weight, eye and hair colour of the person who contributed at least half of her genetic material, along with generalised information about ethnicity, marital status, and the number of other children, if available. Only at 18 are clinics permitted to send out information about a donor’s full identity — name, date of birth, and last known address. But in the meantime, databases can be used to track down close genetic relatives by comparing your DNA results with those of others. There are several Facebook groups and non-profit “search angel” agencies that will help, leading in many cases to identification of donors for those who want to know.

On a cynical reading, the popularity of such kits is yet another reflection of our narcissistic culture and its obsession with identity — understood as something socially marketable that elevates you into desirably select company and away from the common herd. Certainly, across the political spectrum there are those who take DNA results as implying something positively fascinating about them as individuals, whether this involves celebrating the discovery of supposedly pure white ancestry or thrilling to the thought of unknown distant Jewish forebears. But in another more basic sense of “identity” — meaning one’s private sense of self — testing clearly offers hugely significant information about immediate biological origins to those who lack it.

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Granted, within philosophical theories of personal identity, there is a tendency to favour a certain configuration of qualitative psychological aspects as the definitive factor, rather than prioritising the biological make-up of a particular human organism. (John Locke, for instance, thought that personal identity was determined by continuity of memories — according to him, complete amnesia made you a whole new person.) But even if identity in this fundamental sense is determined by psychological not biological factors, the fact remains that beliefs about your birth parents usually make a big difference to your psychology. In a recent survey of donor-conceived people, 85% reported a shift in their “sense of self” upon learning of their origins, and about half “sought psychological help in order to cope”. Nearly 74% said that they “often or very often” thought about the nature of their conception.

It’s really not hard to understand why that might be. Indeed, you might assume that the rise in the popularity of home DNA testing has proved the final nail in the coffin for the myth that people can be socialised into total indifference about immediate genetic forebears. For a long time now, academics in the humanities have been churning out arguments to undermine the importance of bloodlines — whether that’s by ideologically prioritising nurture over nature and ignoring potential genetic confound; mounting pejorative attacks on the spectre of “biological essentialism”; or arguing, with stunning post-structuralist chutzpah, that biology generally is a socially constructed fiction. But still, in practice, most people have remained stubbornly immune to this intellectual pressure.

In a society obsessed with building hierarchies of suffering, there can sometimes also be a suspicion that, should you mention the psychological importance of knowing about your immediate origins, you are somehow discriminating against anyone who lacks such knowledge. More generally there is distaste for ever defining any aspect of family in terms of biological connection, for fear of hurting those orphans, adoptees, or donor-conceived people who don’t know much about theirs.

The preferred argumentative move here seems to be: take something traditionally defined in terms of a biological role (in this case, the concept of a parent); identify some socially important activities that tend to accompany that role (for instance: caring, nurturing, defending a child from harm, and so on); then hive those activities off conceptually from the biological substrata, and redefine the original concept in terms of the social stuff alone. This argument works much better for the concept of “parent” than it does for the much-discussed concept of “woman” — partly because parenting is an activity but “womaning” is not. Even so, agreeing that parenting should be understood as a mainly social relationship should not stop us insisting that facts about biological kinship rightly retain great meaning for people.

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The fertility sector seems to be in bad faith about this point, indirectly acknowledging the importance of biological ties when it comes to regulating information about donors, while continuing to try to break humans up for their reproductive parts wherever there’s adult demand for it. In March, for instance, the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission recommended that a surrogate mother — including one who has contributed her own egg to her own pregnancy — should no longer automatically count as the resultant baby’s legal mother. It also suggested that she be given reduced time after birth to change her mind.

Yet at the very same time, it was proposed that a new “Surrogacy Register” be built, in order “to add greater transparency and give children born through surrogacy the opportunity to trace their origins when they are older”. In this, the Law Commissions follow a general trend in the modern-day fertility industry: make it easier for a newborn to have no meaningful relationship at all with her biological family while still insisting that one day she must be able to know who they are and where they live.

But uncomfortable as it may be for some to admit, the strong desires of many donor-conceived children to get information about genetic parents cannot be surgically detached from their emotional wish to have a meaningful relationship with biological family members that goes well beyond the bare registering of names and addresses. By the time a donor-conceived person gets information about her genetic background, a real relationship may be impossible for several reasons — but that doesn’t make its absence any the less a source of sadness for many. The psychotherapeutic literature contains much reflection about how a therapist might work with a client in order to mitigate such a great personal loss.

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No doubt such an experience is not the case for everybody — but still, it is for many. And it’s also possible that restricted amounts of information about a donor’s identity may feel worse for some people than nothing at all. Scrolling through a Facebook photo album of happy strangers who happen to be your own biological family appears a potentially desolate and alienating prospect, to say the least.

Recognition of the value of real connection with your genetic family is also implicit in several responses to the HFEA’s public consultation on donor anonymity, which notes that information about half-siblings is often just as longed for by a donor-conceived person as information about a missing biological parent. Equally, if there were no widespread desire for a relationship in the first place, it would be hard to understand why fertility clinics encourage donors to write a “goodwill message” to give to “any potential children” when they are of an age to receive it.

To take such ordinary and familiar human longings seriously would force us to confront why society is increasingly signing off on the production of infants — from scratch, as it were — in ways designed to cut them off from future meaningful connection to their biological roots. We might even have to push back collectively against flashy lobbying groups who, with the help of heartrending stories about adult infertility, present reproduction via someone else’s genetic material as a right, and who apparently could not care less about the finer details of what this might mean for the emotional lives of children afterwards. But since we can’t apparently do any of this with much conviction, it will be easier for many to carry on pretending that who you come from, exactly, doesn’t matter — even as we make new laws insisting that you must always be allowed to find out.

Recently, the label has made multiple forays into the gothic, not least by mining the aesthetics of climate collapse for several recent shows. (As one women’s magazine enthused: “Balenciaga brought the apocalypse to Paris and we’re here for it.”) So perhaps brand managers expected the disturbing imagery of young kids surrounded by bondage gear to be treated as just another subversive juxtaposition in the service of selling things. This time, however, the bourgeois were not so much thrillingly épaté as absolutely bloody incandescent — because they assumed that childhood itself was being sold.

Internet sleuths quickly tracked down details of an earlier Balenciaga campaign, in which background props had included a Supreme Court ruling on the illegality of child pornography, as well as a book by an artist controversial for depicting tortured children in his work. The two separate campaigns were quickly conflated by commentators, jointly presented as a case of paedophilic imagery gloating lasciviously in plain sight. Some observers went further, interpreting the placing of lettered packing tape in the most recent campaign as spelling out a reference to Baal, the Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifices.

In some quarters of the populist Right, where the legacy of QAnon still looms large, Christmas had come early. Tucker Carlson weighed in, bravely putting his own history of joking about child rape behind him, to connect the incident to groomer discourse and admonish the world to “stop sexualising kids”. Creepy geezer-bro Andrew Tate argued that Balenciaga was being deliberately open and explicit about paedophilic sympathies because the “people who are in charge of these brands, and of the Western world” are “Satanists” who deliberately “tell you what they are doing” in order to avoid karmic retribution for their sins. (Any reflection by Tate on earlier frank admissions of his that “I am absolutely sexist and I’m absolutely a misogynist” went unrecorded.)

Though — of course — I don’t know the truth of what actually happened at Balenciaga, it seems to me that the “deliberately paedophilic” interpretation is probably wrong. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing was an accident. As others have suggested, rather than acting as a direct manifestation of a paedophile conspiracy, it seems more likely that the campaigns were offering knowing nods to the aesthetics of paedophile conspiracies. Viewed in this light, the problem is not so much the imagery but that the proles on the internet hadn’t done a Masters in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths.

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This interpretation is in keeping with the modus operandi of high fashion. The higher the couture, and the more luxurious the brand, the more effort must be made to signal this status to the world. One traditional way to do this is by using hand-embroidered silks and other gorgeous fabrics to make clothes. But a reality-transcending brand image can also be achieved by dressing women up in totally impractical garments they can’t walk or get through doors in, or — as Balenciaga also recently did — by inducing a celebrity such as Kim Kardashian to wear ridiculous facemasks in public on a number of occasions.

As Louise Perry has argued, fears about paedophilia are often viewed by liberals as classically low-status, and associated by them with the “ignorant and credulous working classes”. And so, ironically sneering about low-status cultural fears about paedophiles, in a way only detectable to a few knowing onlookers, is automatically high-status. Job done. Or it would have been, had it not proved understandably impossible for most onlookers to tell the difference between representation and reality.

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Liberals have a fetish problem

By Kathleen Stock

As with Balenciaga’s attraction to the gothic, the fashion world more generally has long played about with savagery and psychic darkness for the purposes of selling people things they don’t need. In practice this often means glamourising various terrible things done to women. Alexander McQueen’s first two (visually stunning) collections were called “Jack the Ripper and his Victims” and “The Highland Rapes”. A 2007 Dolce & Gabbana ad campaign was highly suggestive of gang rape, and a 2003 Sisley campaign of bestiality between a woman and a bull.

Generally speaking, the fashion industry is littered with pictures of young women with a sexualised, exploited, fetishised, or downright quasi-paedophilic vibe. And female consumers apparently lap it up — perhaps because they tell themselves, accurately, that promoting abusive sex is not the direct point. As with everything else in the fashion world, nothing is positively asserted, but only referred to obliquely or quoted in order to generate interest in the clothes.

Yet when you look at some of the blank-eyed skeletal young models who still tend to be preferred by designers, it’s impossible to maintain that the casual brutality dished out to women in the representational realm of fashion doesn’t have consequences for the real one. Models are treated by the fashion world as living dolls you can pick from a book purely on the basis of appearance, then dress them up, choose their poses, control their food intake, and fly them around the world to serve you, until you don’t want them anymore. Granted, not every model is skinny or young these days, but even those who aren’t are just as heavily objectified — every personalised aspect of them being diminished to a commercially favourable appearance, interchangeable with some other commercially favourable appearance, should the originally-booked girl have a breakdown or get a breakout.

But at least most models are adults, technically anyway. For me, an under-explored aspect of the Balenciaga scandal is the apparent fact that parents somewhere have let their very young children be photographed in these campaigns. It is bad enough to represent grown adults as slack-jawed, vacant children, but a lot worse to turn children into slack-jawed, vacant little adults. Generally speaking, I marvel in horror at parents who use their children to make money by modelling or acting in adverts. No matter how much fun children allegedly have doing it, or how much money goes into their trust funds because of it, there is nothing about having one’s appearance objectified by strangers for money that’s compatible with healthy childhood development.

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And of course, it’s not just commercial modelling. Famous for admonishing us against using other humans as mere means to our ends, Kant also warned that “parents cannot regard their child as, in a manner, a thing of their own making”. Then again, he wasn’t on Insta. The internet is full of influencers using their own children for likes and clicks. If social media has turned many of us into narcissists, then it seems to have turned our children into narcissistic extensions of ourselves — only there to say something flattering about who we are. A generation of kids are growing up, made supremely conscious of how their bodies and faces look as they go about their daily lives, before they really know anything else about themselves. And we made them that way.

Moral panics get off the ground partly because they pick up on unconscious forces genuinely rippling through a culture. It doesn’t seem to me a coincidence that there’s increasing prurient interest in paedophilia and grooming at the moment, when at the same time there have never been so many culturally acceptable ways to objectify your own child. Paedophilia — which of course exists, and nobody should pretend different — involves the egregious and permanently life-changing treatment of a living human child as a sexual object. But there are subtler ways to use children as means to adult ends. We can sign them up to a modelling agency. We can put them in a beauty pageant. We can upload their pictures with amusing captions on Facebook, in a way that makes us look like good parents.

So the original fear about Balenciaga — that they are selling kids — was perhaps not entirely wrong. If not kids, then collectively we are at least selling childhoods. And the hideous teddy bear fetish bags highlighted in the doomed ad campaign now seem to me to be an uncannily apt symbol of what we are doing. A much-beloved figure, originally invested with so much innocence, joy, and love, now turned into something to be used.

Last week, she posted a poem online declaring that if only she’d been Vladimir Putin’s mum, he would have been “so loved, held in the arms of joyous light” that instead of “calling Mother Russia” and rolling the tanks toward Kiev, he’d have phoned Mother AnnaLynne. And she would have saved him from this terrible deed, “with the love only a mother can give”.

Something of the same faith in a mother’s power to create the world you want for your child, out of raw love and determination, suffuses Marlo Mack’s How To Be A Girl. A memoir of raising her transgender daughter, referred to in the book as “M”, it captures convincingly the fierce determination mothers have to lay down their lives for their children’s wellbeing.

But is love really enough to protect a child from pain? This is a complicated question. It’s not so long ago that Western mothers were encouraged to leave babies to cry, to “exercise their lungs”; in other cultures mothers willingly subject their daughters to painful FGM. Mothers in every age have faced death or worse to protect their children to their utmost power; but what we seek to protect our children from varies enormously.

Mack describes how, age four, ‘M’ said to her: “Something went wrong in your tummy” that “made me come out as a boy”. She describes M sobbing: “Put me back, so I can come out again as a girl.” How to respond? We allow or fend off suffering for our children according to a wider moral framework. And reading How To Be A Girl, it’s clear that Mack and I both love our children, but differ significantly in that framework.

In contrast to my British pessimism, she inhabits a Democrat-voting Seattle milieu, whose culture draws on a West Coast American tradition that prioritises individualism and empathy. In the influential words of 20th-century Californian psychotherapist Carl Rogers, this view argues that within each of us exists an “actualising tendency” that draws us organically toward becoming our true selves. For Rogers, all we need to “actualise” is “unconditional positive regard”.

Within the Hollywood-individualist worldview, adult violence, cruelty and aggression are caused by a lack of love and acceptance: the deficit McCord believes now drives Russian aggression in Ukraine. “If I was your mother,” says McCord in her address to Vladimir Putin, “I’d have died to make you warm.”

If I believed, like Rogers or McCord, that adult wrongdoing is driven by lack of love and acceptance, I expect I, too, would go to great lengths to provide my child with an adequate supply of “positive regard”. I expect, in other words, that I’d do much as she does: accept her child’s right to self-define. This leap of faith and validation made, she describes the relief she and her ex-husband both experience: “Before, everything was tense and contested, everything was a fight. Afterward, we were at peace.”

I expect I’d move mountains, as she does, to see that this extends beyond just the family and all the way out into the world. She even starts a playgroup for trans children, calling it the “Be-Your-True-Self Play Group”. How To Be A Girl shows the degree to which a mother’s love can reshape reality itself. And it also shows the power such commitment has, in an age where many are desperately in search of something to believe in.

For if we’ve always put together competing stories from the same facts, today’s culture is perhaps unique in the tools it offers us to project our worldview digitally into the wider world. But while you might think seeing so many different perspectives would enable greater empathy, in fact the reverse seems to be happening: evermore antagonistic filter bubbles have emerged, tranforming into communities of belief: a process Katherine Dee calls “fandomification”.

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How To Be A Girl recounts, in microcosm, the formation of just such a “fandom” or community of belief. Having decided to reorder reality around her child’s own sense of self, Mack is then committed to projecting this sovereign right to self-define out into the wider world. She recounts the emotional rollercoaster of telling family, then the neighbours; finding a school where her child can “be a girl”. And increasingly, these choices — all rooted in a clearly sincere commitment to holding her child “in the arms of joyous light” — come to shape and define Mack’s own life and activities, drawing her deeper into the trans-rights community of belief via the community she builds both in real life and online.

First she joins a support group for parents of “trans kids”. She starts blogging, and receives heartfelt positive feedback (as well as death threats) from strangers. She joins a local Trans Pride march, attends conferences, receives media inquiries. She starts a podcast with her child.

The story opens with her divorce and her child “coming out” as transgender; both lives are rebuilt over the course of the book, around M’s transness. But the only question she receives about the all-encompassing nature of this project is from a man she is dating, who asks her: “You’re so into this transgender thing… It’s your daughter who’s transgender, right?”

Instead of hearing this as a question about her embrace of the trans-rights fandom, though, Mack interprets this as him asking if she is in fact transgender. She dismisses this as absurd and offensive and dumps him. There’s no question of making space within the world she’s constructing for the possibility that it has an outside.

But it does have an outside. I, for example, do not believe all the evil in the world can be cured by maternal love, or indeed that humans can change sex. How To Be A Girl meant, for me, stepping out of the gender-critical filter bubble into the world as it appears to a woman who has staked not just her own identity and social world but literally her child’s body on believing gender identity is real. Doing so was like visiting the Upside Down.

Mack and I share numerous reference points on the topic of transgender rights, but are familiar with radically opposing interpretations of them. She takes at face value the (debunked among gender-critical feminists) statistic about the high risk of suicide among trans children, for example, while treating as debunked the study, widely cited in gender-critical circles, about the high percentage of trans children who desist if left alone.

Elsewhere she curates stories in a way that’s a photographic negative of the one I’m accustomed to. She notes, for example, that the pioneer of “watchful waiting” in gender-identity treatment, Kenneth Zucker, was “fired” from the clinic he ran, and the clinic itself “shut down pending an investigation of its practices”. Move the picture, though, and the optical illusion changes. Zucker was eventually paid $586,000 in damages after it was ruled that he was wrongfully dismissed; the question is whether that gets reported.

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Similarly, in her discussion of America’s “bathroom bill” court cases, she states that there “wasn’t any evidence” that “men posing as transgender women were infiltrating changing rooms”. But step into the other fandom, and you’ll soon hear about the evidence.

In the online battles over which facts to curate, it’s easy to forget that what’s at stake is real people, with real lives, and — as is clearly the case with Marlo Mack — real love for a real child. But this doesn’t make the escalating contest between incompatible fandoms less intense. Quite the opposite. For if there’s a common theme to the bitterest online disputes, it’s they’re rooted in questions that, somewhere at least, someone is willing to stake living bodies on.

It’s perhaps telling that Mack’s story ends with M aged 13. Transition has, up to that point, only resisted social norms; the reader is spared the far more gruelling and invasive fight against biological ones. But the blocker is inserted, and the book ends with M “excited to be growing up”. And speaking of M’s participation in a long-term study on trans kids, Mack rejoices that “Our kids would be part of a historic cohort”.

Move the picture, though, and the image changes: another way of saying this might be “conducting medical experiments on children without a control group”. Regardless, Mack is willing to stake her child’s body on her convictions — and in a post-Christian culture desperately searching for meanings, it’s no wonder competing online communities of belief take shape around such certainty. And this in turn forces us to confront the fact that disputes with real stakes in real bodies aren’t like arguments over fictional fandoms. Some battles between filter bubbles really are zero-sum.

You can read books that say reality should be re-ordered to accommodate children like M, and others that say humans can’t change sex. If it doesn’t affect you, you can murmur about the “marketplace of ideas”. But which fandom sets the rules for life in the material world is a political question, and on matters that affect the wider legal or cultural framework, there is nowhere neutral to stand.

Mack is willing to swim against the tide of biology, transform an entire legal system, hammer other people’s use of language into new shapes, for the sake of her child. And as she recounts the role her struggle plays in her own identity, as well as M’s, it’s increasingly clear that succeeding is an existential matter for both of them. This is emotive enough when what’s at stake is children’s wellbeing. But when it’s the life and death of an entire nation, everything intensifies again: the appeal of joining one or another fandom, the impossibility of neutrality, and the incapacity to think long-term about wider material consequences.

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As we sidle along the edge of nuclear precipice, in the world’s first very online viral war, it’s increasingly clear how easy it is to slide from mutually antagonistic online bubbles powered by love and good intentions, to a world where people call for actual real-world Armageddon on the basis of internet-powered belief. If I have any hope at all of averting catastrophe, it lies in perhaps the most powerful force there is, a force I still have in common with Marlo Mack, despite our radically competing worldviews: we love our children.

As How To Be A Girl amply illustrates, this can be turned to many uses. Loving parents determined to reorder reality around their adored child may drive radical changes across the social, legal and political fabric while ignoring serious knock-on effects elsewhere. But the love we have for our children is also the beginning of life in common.

Anyone raising children needs a community. Most mothers, when they become mothers, set about building one. We can only hope that this need we still have for one another is enough to keep our fraying public life from total conflagration — or, if the worst comes to the worst, to rebuild it from the ashes.

But until recently, it seemed like we were all meant to aspire to the own-nothing-and-be-happy life. It’s a vision in which travel is easy, possessions are minimal (and delivered by drone), work happens remotely on a laptop, and different geographies aren’t homes so much as flavours to sample on a tasting menu.

Perhaps no voice expresses this more elegantly than the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, who this week wrote a plaintive defence of the frictionless life: “The myth of the man-child”.

The childless bachelor male, Ganesh claims, isn’t a perpetual adolescent. Far from it: this figure is cultivated, high-minded, “austere” and well-travelled, with “a decorum, almost a formality, born of aversion to the smells, stains and general boisterousness of a kid-filled home”. The most adult conversations, Ganesh reports, “are with the childless”.

This isn’t the first defence of the frictionless life he’s written. Shortly before the pandemic hit in earnest, he made “The climate case for childlessness”, in which he acknowledged that it’s not really about climate at all, but a desire to stay unencumbered. It’s about “a taste for leisure, a dread of sexual monotony”. He and others like him did not, he says, “hate to ‘bring a child into this world’ […] so much as into our diaries”.

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And this is driven, he claims, by a desire for “maximum control” over life: “I know with some precision the list of cities in which I want to pass the rest of this decade, and in what sequence” — a plan that, he acknowledges, wouldn’t be workable with a spouse and children in tow. Ganesh realises this makes him selfish. But he sees this as “a bid for a more, not a less serious life”.

There was a time I would have nodded energetically along with this idea. I wanted, I would say, joy rather than contentment. (I’m pretty sure I recall claiming that the latter emotion merely ‘bovine’.) I spent my twenties living light, travelling lots, and resisting the accumulation of permanent possessions or obligations.

I could have bought a flat in London back when it was affordable; but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be tied down. Nor did I want a long-term relationship. I didn’t feel stable or coherent enough to tolerate the sheer consistency of commitment to just one other person.

As for the most serious such commitment there is — children — the prospect gave me recurring nightmares. In this I was an early adopter of a now-mainstream Western trend: to remain “child-free”. Many frame this in ecological terms, as in the recent COP26 protest by Population Matters aimed at encouraging people to breed less to save the earth. But a recent Pew poll reported the most common reason given by childless Americans for their decision is simply “I just don’t want to”.

I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on Ganesh, who is thoughtful and clearly aware of the inverse correlation between freedom and intimacy. “Our horizons widen as our commitments narrow,” he observes in his defence of the ‘man-child’. Or, as he puts it differently in a column mourning the decline of expat city-states: “shallowness can be emancipating”.

Even as he defends the atomised hyper-liberal lifestyle, Ganesh is not insensible to what can be lost. He comments, for example, on the way pets “fill a hole” for many millennials in a way allotments, or religion, or volunteering might once have done: “Their dog or cat is the only endothermic mammal that some outwardly successful peers can count on for affection, or don’t have to walk on eggshells around.”

And in any case, even he is uncomfortably aware that his preferred way of life as a “middle class world citizen” may be on borrowed time. Climate anxiety, political instability, middle-class wage stagnation and, more recently, pandemic restrictions all militate against the democratic opening-up of the world to mass frictionlessness.

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But here’s the rub: swapping emancipation for shallowness is less enjoyable when you can’t afford the consumerist upside of minimal ties. One of the first columns I ever wrote here discussed the growing demographic who have embraced liberal atomisation, only to find changing economic conditions have denied them the disposable income that makes being unencumbered fun.

It’s all very well rejecting loyalties and obligations, if your earnings open the full range of upscale world-citizenship for your delectation. But Ganesh has little to offer those who lose this abundance. His best suggestion is that if you own nothing, having spent your twenties acquiring memories, you can always be happy by marrying into money in your thirties. It scarcely needs saying that while this might at a pinch be plausible advice for the kind of 20-something who reads the Financial Times, it’s unlikely to be of use more generally.

For the bottom tier of the new knowledge class is materially increasingly difficult to distinguish from gig-economy proles: both groups own nothing, and neither seems especially happy. Political unrest is rising and, as I’ve argued, the principal distinction between the Left-wing version of this discontent — antifa — and its alt-Right counterpart is cultural.

Some have belatedly realised they traded deep commitments for horizons that aren’t wide at all but shrinking rapidly. Happily not all of these disappointed would-be world citizens have responded by setting cities on fire. And it’s far from a foregone conclusion that the unlucky also-rans who got the atomisation but not the spending-money are all doomed to a future eating mealworm slurry in tiny one-person ‘pod’ homes.

Many are responding in far more constructive ways. For every doomer meme or creepy WEF video, subcultures are emerging in which people raised to be maximally individualist are trying to work out how to live together. In its most mundane form, this looks like a backlash against waiting till your thirties to have kids, or young parents writing about how to rebuild local community. In its more Bay Area-esque form, the social organiser Richard Bartlett is working on strategies for making ‘decentralised’ communities more capable of long-term interpersonal commitment, and thus less vulnerable to the well-documented tendency utopias have of imploding.

Or further out on the apocalyptic spectrum lie green land-based projects such as the Rizoma Field School, which is one of a growing network of families and groups attempting what adherents call ‘Doomer Optimism’: an approach to life based on the idea that things will probably get a lot worse, but that all is not lost if we can find ‘regenerative paths forward’. It seeks to develop sustainable forms of farming and community life, and also teach them to others. Many of these are a long way from the egalitarian ideals of the hippie commune era, and often explicitly opposed to the progressive and hyper-individualist ideas that drove such utopian ventures.

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Will any of this work? ‘Doomer optimist’, smallholder and sustainability academic Jason Snyder is acutely aware of the difficulties likely to be faced by the first generations after Peak Frictionlessness. “An uprooted generation will suffer all sorts of embarrassing contradictions as they try to relocalise,” he observed earlier this year. “They should do it anyway”.

I won’t bore you with how I came to reconsider my commitment to the frictionless life, beyond saying I’m glad I did so just about young enough to form a family before I got too old for that option to be open. But Snyder is right: adjusting to a life organised around the commitments I always feared hasn’t always been easy. It’s not uncommon for family members to get exasperated with me when I do something that implies I still think of myself as a solitary atom-self rather than a member of the team.

I don’t think I’m the only voluntary adopter of a more encumbered life to wrestle with this. The Bay Area technologist Venkatesh Rao captured something of the resulting ambivalence recently. In an increasingly politically unstable world, Rao acknowledged, the frictionless life may be less prudent than stockpiling supplies and working for a durable, secure home. Even so, he doesn’t seem wholly thrilled, tweeting nostalgically: “Remember when the ideal was a backpack, phone, passport, credit card?”. In contrast: “Owning lots of shit and supplies is a PITA [pain in the arse]”.

But what else can we do? Ganesh is right that narrower commitments mean wider horizons. But that’s assuming you can afford to enjoy those wider horizons. And for the rest, when emancipation is unaffordable, all you get is the shallowness.

In response, growing numbers are struggling, however clumsily, to rebuild all those commitments we were raised to discard. It might not work, but I refuse to be cynical towards anyone who’s trying. After all, some loves are worth sacrificing a measure of freedom for. And as the world grows stranger and more unstable, perhaps these are all we’ll be able to rely on.

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

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In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

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The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

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There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

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Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

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Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021

And so the father rocks his son back and forth, holding him safely with one hand. Now fully awake himself, he pulls out his phone, and falls into the abyss. His complete attention is on the screen, its blue light seeming like a balm but acting like a bomb, destroying any natural tiredness. The baby, unable to find his father’s gaze, reaches for the phone. The father, jarred into consciousness, pulls up an animated show created for infants. He puts it in his child’s view. The baby looks. He laughs. The characters on the screen do not respond. The baby frowns. He has no friends here. It is a long time before he falls back asleep.

For all its conveniences, the modern age has not removed the challenges of parenting: the exhaustion, the constant demands, the necessary subordination of one’s needs. In fact, in many ways it has intensified them. Parents’ lives are busier — both with necessary things, like work, and tempting distractions, like Instagram. And so to get through the night, we turn to technological solutions like breast pumps, or the expensive advice of sleep trainers. Meanwhile, we spend our days in front of screens, eating food so processed it barely resembles food anymore, and so brings less nutrition and more risk into our lives.

In our new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21^st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Bret Weinstein and I argue that humans are the ultimate generalists, with such incredible capacity to create new niches for ourselves that we have created a rate of change even we cannot keep up with. And so our brains and bodies are out of step with the 21st century. This mismatch has given rise to all sorts of conditions and diseases that would have been unknown in antiquity — from the widespread need for orthodontia to obesity. A lot of these disorders have their roots in our earliest years.

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As a species, we are social and long-lived, with generational overlap and long childhoods. Some other animals are similar to us in these regards — elephants and orcas, parrots and crows — but humans seem to do everything more. We live in larger groups, with the longest post-reproductive lives, and have the longest childhoods.

If a foal can gallop within a day of its birth, why does it take a human baby months just to learn how to roll over? Childhood is not an error, or a waste of time. It is when we learn to be human. Our giant brains, and our ability and need to connect with other human beings, take years to mature. Very early, we need to be assured of our safety. Soon after, we need to be tested, stretched to our limits.

But the baby introduced earlier may rarely be taken outside, never feeling the sun on his face, or experiencing the minor discomfort of being momentarily cold. That experience can offer not just valuable evidence that discomfort can be recovered from, but also enables the reassuring embrace of his mother as she holds him close, warming him, protecting him. As the baby grows, he learns to self-soothe, to a point. But on a path that is cleared of all challenges, he will not learn what real risk is. Nor can he know the true depth of his parents’ love. They have so successfully cocooned him, including from their own selves.

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Imagine a baby from 15,000 years ago, or 150,000. Before the advent of farming, but after we were fully modern at the anatomical and physiological level. We had language and fire and tools, were cooking our food, living in community, exploring ideas around campfires. Sometime late in that time span we began to make art, to hold funerals, to have rites of passage.

Such a baby would have been snuggled close in the embrace of family and friends, never alone, never isolated. A baby alone in that environment was at high risk; he would have been in actual contact with his mother, or another caregiver, for most of his early life. But as he grew, he would have been allowed more and more freedoms. He would have watched the older children, and played around the fire, and handled sharp tools. He would not have been completely protected from harm, but he also would not have been completely protected from exploration. When his body achieved adulthood, his mind would too: he would be anti-fragile, unlike today’s 18-year-olds.

In A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide, we argue that though modernity has made us healthier in many ways — and expanded our minds — there are exceptions. We do not argue for a return to a simpler time — such a prescription has many problems, but it’s also impossible to fulfil. But we do argue for some caution in adopting all the modern advances, as many of them bring hidden costs, which become visible with an evolutionary lens.

Do not expect tiny babies to sleep alone. It sends a confusing and terrifying message: nobody has your back. If you provide utter reassurance, while they are tiny, that you are there for them, then — far earlier than their coddled counterparts — they will be confident enough to explore on their own, to take and manage risks. They also sleep better — which means you will, too.

Do share parenting as much as possible; early on, this may mean pumping breast milk to save for later. This tool of modernity is so freeing for many women. A mother’s milk is best for nutritional, immunological, and bonding reasons, but the pressure to provide it at all hours can be a burden; sometimes allowing a baby’s father, or another caretaker, to provide it is a gift.

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But here is an example of where moving away from our ancient ways may have hidden costs. What else besides nutrition is stored in that milk? There’s some evidence that breast milk contains circadian cues. If true, then milk delivered at 2 am, straight from the breast, would not only satiate the baby, but also send the signal that it is now time to sleep. Milk expressed at noon, in contrast, would send the opposite signal. When feeding the baby at night, then, it’s best to provide nighttime milk. It won’t hurt, and may very well help.

Do not put screens in front of children, especially screens that have animate objects on them. As Bret and I posit in our book, babies and young children who are entertained by screens will learn to flatten their emotional range; they do not expect humanoid forms to respond to them.

Do eradicate all blue light from the space where you and your baby sleep. Early morning sunlight is so very blue, and those who are regularly exposed to bright outdoor light early in the day are more productive, and more fit, than those who are not. But expose yourself to blue light late at night, when our ancestors would have been gathered around a campfire — or navigating by the pale light of the moon — and find yourself struggling with sleep, and therefore with productivity, creativity, and health.

Do feed your children real food, tempting though it is to lean on processed meals. A healthy person has an incredible diversity of gut flora, obtained from the consumption of whole foods, with as short a supply chain as possible. An unhealthy person ingests shelf-stable products containing multi-syllabic ingredients synthesised in a lab. In house sparrows, eating a diet that is out of whack makes the birds slower to learn, quicker to anger, and generally more stressed. What are the chances that humans are completely unlike house sparrows in this regard?

Do move your body, and encourage your children to move theirs. We are embodied beings. Our screens may compel us to believe that we are mere brains in jars that can manage to type sarcasm and anger and emojis — but we are in fact more, and far better, than that. And it is during our long, lovely childhoods that we find out how connected and creative we can be.

Me: “Time to get in the bath.”
Her: “But I don’t want a bath.”
Me: “You’re still having a bath.”
Her: “You can’t make me.”
Me: “Actually, I can.” [picks up protesting child, places child in bath]

Is this an act of oppression? The journalist Noah Berlatsky might say so. “’Parent’ is an oppressive class,” he wrote recently, “like rich people or white people”. For if you believe all coercion is unjust, the fact that parents often make their kids do things against their will surely qualifies as oppressive. So dedicated egalitarians must either not have kids, or else do everything possible to avoid making this inevitable oppression worse than it has to be. As Berlatsky puts it: “There are things you can do to try to minimize the abuse that’s endemic to the parent/child relationship, but it’s always there”.

How, then, does someone who is opposed to oppression in all forms deal with the occasional need to tell your kids what to do? Look no further than the kids’ TV programme which provokes more Mumsnet rage than any other: Bing.

For readers fortunate enough never to have encountered Bing, it depicts humanoid CGI-animated animal children, of what looks like pre-school age. The characters live in a manicured suburb, where they are cared for by tiny toy-like creatures that appear to represent their parents or — more usually — other carer types such as nannies or grandparents. The eponymous bunny, Bing, is cared for by a small entity called “Flop”. Their relationship is never explained, though Bing addresses Flop by his first name, suggesting he is perhaps some kind of childcare professional.

Episodes always follow the same format. Bing and Flop go about their usual day, when a moment of conflict or heightened emotion occurs: a balloon bursts, Bing’s friend won’t let him have a turn on the swing, Bing kills a butterfly, Bing breaks a window in the garden playing football. The children express (muted) emotions, and the tiny carers explain in soft, gentle voices what went wrong, then suggest something to “make it better”.

The hyper-emphasis on persuasion and gentleness evidenced by Flop (and Berlatsky) may seem peculiarly of our time. But this softly-softly take on parenthood is a well-trodden path. Consider, for example, the 1849 poem Speak Gently, by David Bates:

Speak gently to the little child!
Its love be sure to gain;
Teach it in accents soft and mild:
It may not long remain.

Bates’s poem was popular enough at its time to reappear in (ultimately far more famous) parodied form in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the grotesque Duchess sings to her howling infant:

Speak roughly to your little boy.
and beat him when he sneezes:
he only does it to annoy,
because he knows it teases.

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But it wasn’t until the twentieth century that the balance of parenting advice began to shift decisively against Carroll’s “Duchess”, toward the feather-soft Flop school of child management. The 1922 manual Common Sense in the Nursery, for example, is a typical example of post-war “behaviourism”:

“By training the baby to lie alone […] by feeding him four-hourly by day and not at all by night, a woman is able to lead a human life instead of having it completely disorganised.”

This is hardly beating a baby when he sneezes; but it assumes a child should be as far as possible trained to fit in with parents’ wishes. By the mid-20th century, though, a growing body of advice reversed the polarity. In Baby and Child (1977) Penelope Leach asserted that a baby cannot be “spoiled”, because “they are not grown up or clever enough to be spoiled”. Instead, a mother should fit her own activities to the baby’s point of view. Despite being “very hard work”, Leach thought, this was in fact the best path to happiness not just for the child but for mummy as well: “taking the baby’s point of view does not mean neglecting yours, the parents’ viewpoint. Your interests and his are identical … If you make happiness for him he will make happiness for you.”

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This progressive inversion of the balance of power in a parent/child relationship is perfectly captured by the relative size of the adult and child characters in Bing. My daughter was mistaken to think I couldn’t make her have a bath, because I’m physically much bigger than her, and happy to use that advantage to enforce personal hygiene. But Flop is around a third of Bing’s size, so if Bing sat down on the bathmat and refused to get in the bath, Flop would not be able to make him comply.

Luckily, unlike in the real world, in Bing world this sort of adult/child conflict of wills never happens. Instead, Bing is the ideal child, as depicted by 20th-century progressive parenting guru Benjamin Spock, who opined in Baby and Child Care (1955) that “If a child is handled in a friendly way, he wants to do the right thing, the grown-up thing, most of the time”. From this perspective, there’s no need for discipline because, all you need is love.

A decade later, Californian therapist Carl Rogers was making a similar argument in the realm of psychotherapy. Rogers argued against Christianity’s pessimistic take on humans’ baked-in propensity for evil, the doctrine of original sin, as well as the psychoanalytic reworking of original sin in the form of “id”, “libido” and “death instinct”. Contra these downbeat visions of human nature, Rogers argued that “the innermost core of man’s nature, the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his ‘animal nature’ is positive in nature — is basically socialised, forward-moving, rational and realistic”.

In this view, bad deeds are not a consequence of human nature, but only ever a result of trauma, ignorance or error. There’s no need for containment or discipline, only forgiveness and education — or, as Rogers would put it, “unconditional positive regard”.

When Bing breaks the window of the garden shed after Flop already suggested (in the usual gentle voice) that he refrain from kicking the ball hard, Bing is guilty and apologetic. But of course this is a mistake, not disobedience, so when he whines to Flop “I forgetted about the big kicks”, Flop just soothes: “It’s easy to forget”. There are no further consequences. Indeed, the only reason to impose rules at all is personal safety, as evidenced by the uncharacteristic firmness with which Flop orders the children away from the broken glass.

If we take Bing as an idealised template for what both parents and children are meant to look like, it’s a rosy vision of humans as fundamentally innocent and good, and of optimum development as ordered mainly around the child’s needs.

Bing is never aggressive, capricious or lacking in empathy. He never throws a tantrum. He’s a very 21^st-century mixture of ignorant, self-centred and susceptible to guilt trips: the perfect child-centred child. Responsible adults organise their lives around the children’s needs and desires, never themselves express any emotion (especially not anger) and don’t leave children to resolve conflict between them, and only impose clear rules when physical safety is at risk. There’s no punishment, no one ever loses their rag, there’s no need to make the kids do anything, ever.

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If there’s a reason Bing prompts so much swearing on Mumsnet, it’s because this is an insanely rosy view of what wrangling small children is actually like. Already in 1969, Benjamin Spock was warning that touchy-feeliness can go too far, observing in an updated edition of Baby that in fact love is not all you need. Parents have “welcomed new theories’, Spock observed, but “They have often read meanings into them that went beyond what the scientists intended—for instance, that all that children need is love; that they shouldn’t be made to conform … that whenever anything goes wrong it’s the parents’ fault; that when children misbehave the parents shouldn’t become angry or punish them but try to show more love”.

Berlatsky is half-right, but not in the way he thinks: oppression is indeed baked into the parent/child relationship, if by “oppression” you mean hierarchy and occasionally coercion. But he, and proponents of radically egalitarian parenting in general, are wrong to imagine this dynamic should be minimised. On the contrary, the fact that parents have authority over their children should be cheerfully embraced, for the child’s psychological health.

Whether you call it original sin or the death instinct, all humans come with a capacity for darkness as well as light. My experience as a parent is that this isn’t the product of culture: it’s baked in. We don’t have to beat our children for sneezing to know it’s not enough to claim our dark side can be loved away. Sometimes it needs to be contained, by clear boundaries lovingly maintained.

If we fail to do this, the result isn’t kinder or more moral individuals; it’s more stunted ones. If parents convey the message that the only permissible emotions are sanitised ‘positive’ ones, never hatred, greed, envy, vengefulness or rage, it becomes the child’s responsibility to keep a lid on his or her own strong feelings. I know poor Bing is not a real person, but I’m still horrified by how limited the range of his emotional responses is. Even when Pando smashes Bing’s best sandcastle, all Bing manages is a plaintive, vaguely passive-aggressive ‘awww, that was our biggest sandcastle ever’.

At the end of each episode, Bing breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, offering a summary of what happened and how it made him feel. Usually what Bing felt was ‘sad’, and even if it’s ‘angry’ this is relayed in a sad voice. I can only conclude that this poor anthropomorphic bunny-child has already learned to prune his own emotions into an acceptably progressive range.

For this is what it looks like when parents refuse to step up to the position of authority our children need us to take. The result will either be out-of-control kids desperate for someone to provide some containment, or else the stunted feelings of someone who has learned it’s not safe to throw a wobbler. So Berlatsky is right that parents are tyrants, but his mistake is to imagine that this is a bad thing. The loving imposition of authority by parents, in a child’s interests, is not oppression. It’s a vital condition for the inverse of oppression: safety, freedom, and the space to be a child.

We have heard a great deal about the impact of lockdown on new mothers and teenagers, but what about what it has done — and is doing — to younger children? Toddlers are, of course, endlessly adaptable; but they are also malleable: their experiences can have life-long consequences. The ‘Babies In Lockdown’ report, commissioned by three leading parenting groups and published in August, concluded that “the pandemic will cast a long shadow”, pointing to the fact that, just when they are meant to be building their social skills, emotional intelligence and confidence, children have been prevented from properly engaging with the world. They desperately need routine. And now, only a couple of months after things started getting back to normal, life has been disrupted again by this second lockdown.

I’ve definitely noticed little changes in my son’s behaviour over the past month. Largely harmless, they reveal the imprint of this pandemic on his still-emerging character. He puts on his mask when he plays shops and now scrubs his hands with a nail brush, talking about germs. I once assumed it was impossible to impose hygiene standards and social distancing rules on toddlers, but as Natasha Rawdon-Rego, founder of Wimbledon’s Oak Nursery, attests, her children have adapted — perhaps too well. “It is almost like they police each other,” she says. The physical freedom of being a toddler is being restrained and they are becoming enthusiastic enforcers. One friend’s toddler will protest when she sees crowds on TV, or people hugging; another arranges her dolls into small groups so they are appropriately spaced. When organisations like the Beavers issue Covid Codes of Conduct for children aged six to sign, it’s surely time to question the value and legitimacy of all this.

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In many ways, these new rules are much worse than the ‘stranger danger’ parental paranoia of yesteryear: we are now telling kids not to physically engage with people they actually know. My three-year-old is a potential super-spreader and his grandparents are potential victims. But how different and more challenging would this pandemic have been if it had been the other way round, with children in the vulnerable category needing to shield? That was precisely the case with the polio epidemic in the first half of the twentieth century. Playgrounds were shut, swimming pools were closed, and social distancing rules were put in place, especially in middle class areas (it was found that working class kids living in less sanitary conditions were actually more immune). Did the fear and restrictions scar baby boomers for life? Not really. Most not directly touched by this epidemic can barely remember it.

All this suggests we need not fixate on the impact new societal rules are having on kids. Although it won’t convince the Covid-sceptics, evidence from Asia points to the fact that mask-wearing can actually have a positive effect on a child’s communication skills, because it makes them more perceptive of eye and facial expressions.

More important than any social rules, though, is what is going on in the home. As psychotherapist and author of The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, Philippa Perry tells me, “the greatest shaper of a child will be their environment and the mood of their parents, so they will pick up on what is going on at home.” She adds “whether that is more lovely togetherness and family time and more attention, or more worry, fretfulness and panic, they’ll take in whatever is going on like a sponge and it will be a formative experience.”

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With everyone confined to their homes, lockdown has revealed socioeconomic disparities like nothing else. Quality internet connection for schoolwork or a garden for exercise have become key social dividers. Investigations by academics at Oxford Brookes have shown the unsurprising detrimental impact the closure of free public spaces such as playgrounds and libraries has had on those families without books or a garden. They also found that toddlers from low-income families ended up having higher daily screen use than those from wealthier families. But could this be a blip we all recover from?

The youngest generation have been dubbed coronnials: born in the time of Corona to millennial parents, usually into dual income households. The defining characteristic of coronnials will not be their high standards of hygiene — or even the disruption of schoolwork — but their response to the major and lasting shift in their parents’ working patterns. Those children whose parents are able to work from home will end up seeing far more of mum and dad than any other generation before them. “For a lot of parents who work full time I think this has been a real opportunity,” observed Rawdon-Rego speaking of her families in firmly middle-class Wimbledon. “During lockdown on-line nursery, I went round the circle and asked if anyone wanted to share how they felt and one boy put his hand up. I asked him how he felt and he said ‘Happy, because my daddy doesn’t have to go to work anymore.’” So many parents who have worked from home feel that they have been gifted time, which largely explains why they are loath to return to the office. The length of this pandemic also means that new habits and new schedules are forming which are unlikely to be reversed when we return to ‘normal’ whenever and whatever that looks like.

Covid has also momentarily paused the incessant activity-driven parenting common among middle-class millennials, who have been encouraged to think that family time has to be memorable, productive and worthwhile. In perhaps a sign of the times, the Hoop app — which offers personalised lists of family activities and which had been downloaded by 1.5 million families in the UK — went out of business during lockdown and does not look likely to return. Perhaps parents have realised that all those toddler raves, samba dancing, Brazilian drumming and coding camps made for great social media posts, but in reality were exhausting and expensive. Fresh air, independent play and occasional boredom are just as rewarding.

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But those whose parents are unable to work from home — which in towns like Barnsley is 8 out of 10 workers — are bound to suffer disproportionately. Services that provide childcare have been restricted or closed, while parents have been unable to lean on friends and family who might ordinarily step in to help. The impact of the stress caused by this situation should not be underestimated: an NSPCC report on the risk of child maltreatment in lockdown found that “increase in stressors to parents and care givers” could “increase the risk of physical, emotional, and domestic abuse” as well as neglect and online harm.

And for those children for whom home is not safe, lockdown has been a terrible experience. Social workers dreaded the closure of schools back in March because of the crucial structure they provide for vulnerable children. One Met police officer in Hackney tells me that in ‘normal times’ cases relating to minors are normally referrals from social workers or schools, but under lockdown his unit saw an increasing number of children ringing 999 themselves (which inevitably meant theirs were emergency or at least very serious cases). Meanwhile, social workers are finding their work is compromised by social distancing: it is very difficult to talk to a child about potential abuse or a care plan over video or in a mask.

Fortunately, schools have remained opened since the second lockdown kicked in. But other institutions are once again threatened, meaning that children will yet again be confined to home. More time spent together as a family will be the force that shapes this generation, for better or worse. Fundamentally, there will be a divide, more evident and visible as time goes on, between children whose family structures nurtured them during the great pandemic, and those whose circumstances exacerbated the crisis and compounded their disadvantages.

It was like we had some kind of special telepathic bond — and I’m sure that wasn’t the drugs talking. In fact, telepathy is exactly what Rupert Sheldrake would call it. In 2002, the author and scientist surveyed breastfeeding mothers to investigate a phenomenon in which some women experience a milk letdown reflex when their babies are hungry, even if the baby is some distance away, for example in nursery. In the study, 16% of the mothers confirmed that they’d experienced this.

Depending on who you ask, Sheldrake is either a pioneering biologist or a woo-woo merchant. But I do believe a kind of connection does exist between mothers and their children. You can call it woo-woo if you like: I call it Mum Bluetooth.

About 48 hours after the birth, I became seriously ill. My Bluetooth glitched. I was put on a drip, and watching nurses take my baby away, I felt nothing but relief that she wasn’t my responsibility any more. She was just a thing: a burden. But as I recovered, the feeling of symbiosis came back along with an urgent need to hold and feed her. By far the most upsetting memory in the subsequent months was not the C-section or even the complications, but the temporary disappearance of the Bluetooth.

Until recently, I would have said that the feeling of oneness is a short-term thing, maybe a hormonal byproduct of birth and breastfeeding, and likely wears off as a baby becomes a toddler. But lockdown changed my mind.

When lockdown started, my husband and I agreed we’d parent in shifts, with me at my desk from 5am till noon and him from noon until the evening. We’d both get something close to a full working day, our daughter would always have a parent with her, it was egalitarian. It seemed like a great plan.

Except it didn’t work. Every day I’d emerge at noon to start my parenting shift — only to find I couldn’t get in the zone. I’d forgotten how to speak child.

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As time went on, the feeling of disengagement got worse. I’d get impatient with my daughter. I couldn’t think of things to do with her. I’d be on Twitter when she was talking to me, snapping at her for trivial things, counting the hours until I could plonk her in front of the telly and go cook tea.

Four weeks in, she was running to her father rather than me for everything, which in turn made me resentful and paranoid. I started to worry about my own mental health, as by now it was obvious even to me that something was seriously wrong. Our daughter was showing signs of distress as well, climbing into bed and turning her face to the wall.

The nadir came when I was in charge one afternoon, and nipped upstairs to have a shower while she watched TV. With the shower on I didn’t hear as she closed the latch on the sitting room door, then wanted to get out but couldn’t work the handle, then screamed for me. When I came downstairs my husband had already found her, curled up hysterically sobbing behind the door.

The degree to which I’d come adrift from my own child’s needs appalled me then, as did my own strange numbness. I suddenly understood the weirdly grief-like emotions I’d been experiencing, and that I’d attributed to general lockdown stress. I was mourning the Bluetooth.

Something about the schedule was attenuating the Mum Bluetooth. Small children are at their best first thing in the morning, and losing that time with my daughter was scrambling the signal. So I took a week off work. I got up with her every day, helped her dress, organised tabletop crafts. We read stories and played. She helped me do housework.

Within 24 hours, she perked up. The moping in bed stopped. Her appetite improved. She stopped refusing to go outside. She started playing independently again instead of panicking every time I left the room.

And I came back as well. I stopped feeling so paranoid, and my thinking became less muddled. My creative mind – which had been on the brink of seizing up altogether – came roaring back. Apparently the Bluetooth wasn’t just a source of nourishment for my child, but for me as well.

My hunch is mothers experience the Bluetooth more strongly, on average, than fathers. Other women know what I mean  — the men only sometimes. So is it a biological thing — a consequence of gestating and breastfeeding? It’s tempting to imagine so. But a recent NBER study from Princeton academic Henrik Kleven and others suggests possibly not, or at least not straightforwardly.

The study surveyed a large Danish dataset covering career differentials between mothers and fathers in both natural and adoptive families, and showed that the same divergence between the sexes happens in adoptive families. That is, mothers were still prioritising family life even when this wasn’t biologically driven, as it would be if they were breastfeeding.

Of course the study wasn’t looking at the Mum Bluetooth. It was looking into the relative effect of parenthood — adoptive or biological — on mothers’ and fathers’ careers. What is also called the “child penalty”. But clearly something is changing mothers’ work patterns more than fathers’ when children come along. Denmark is one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, and still comes nowhere near parity of workplace achievement between the sexes — so it can’t all be down to sexist stereotypes. I think some of the disparity is down to women working less in order to safeguard the Bluetooth.

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There are plenty of accounts of how young children live in partial symbiosis with their mothers. But the same account is much more rarely given from the mother’s perspective. It crops up in feminist debates from the 18th-century Hannah More to Vanessa Olorenshaw today, but again and again such accounts seem to end up on the cutting-room floor. Instead, ‘feminism’ is presented as an individualistic philosophy, that starts with Simone de Beauvoir and ends with ‘gender pay gap’ audits and a fixation on parity of workplace representation for women at the very top of the social scale.

Why? Well, one problem is discussion of sex-based differences in priorities devolves quickly into stereotypes. When we talk about even well-evidenced normative differences between the sexes, it’s easy to slip from being descriptive (men or women are more likely to show this or that trait) to prescriptive (all men should be like this, all women should be like that).

None of this is to say I don’t think there are highly attuned dads, or hopelessly disengaged mums. Of course there are. But a trend doesn’t have to be universal to be salient.

Feminists are understandably wary of any suggestion that women have more pronounced nurturing traits than men. But whether it’s a consequence of childbirth, socialisation, hormones or whatever, it’s my observation that mothers are generally more aware of (and likely to value) the feeling of being slightly Bluetoothed with our kids. And pretending that doesn’t exist or that it’s an equal-opportunities phenomenon runs the risk of encouraging many mothers to ignore or even stifle a major source of life-enhancing joy.

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It also closes down important lines of enquiry about how to work as a mother, without work and the Bluetooth ending up in zero-sum conflict. There’s a degree to which this is unavoidable – it’s not really possible simultaneously to read feminist political theory and build dens with a three-year-old. But for me at least, it turns out that muffling the Bluetooth has a negative impact on my ability to think and work, even when I do have uninterrupted time.

I’ve come to accept that there’s a limit on the amount of child-free time I can carve out of any given week, because if I breach that limit, the Bluetooth goes on the blink and I become so miserable I lose the ability to think full stop. But within this constraint, creative work and the Bluetooth don’t have to be antagonistic but are instead mutually reinforcing. The Bluetooth is a powerful source of creative energy, and core to a distinctively maternal take on the good life.

If I’m right about all this, family policy needs to be turned upside down. To succeed in current mainstream working life, employees of both sexes more or less have to pretend we don’t have families. What would it look like if we reimagined work so it was Bluetooth-enabled? Now that would be radical.

For those who haven’t reproduced, there is infinite insult in a world where progeny are treated as proof of moral worth. Andrea Leadsom was clumsy enough to say it out loud during her 2016 campaign for the Tory leadership when she told the Times that being a mother gave her an edge over childless Theresa May because it meant she had “a very real stake in the future of our country”, but there are plenty who hold similar opinions without ever quite voicing them.

Being a parent supposedly gives you purpose, access to a love that makes other loves seem flimsy, is a statement of global optimism (why have children if you don’t think there’ll be a world for them to live in?), and an act of sublime selflessness.

Which leaves the non-parents implicitly adrift, with nothing to comfort them but their allegedly shallow version of human affection, their bitter pessimism and their selfishness — and, presumably, a powerful urge to point out that being a parent  didn’t actually make Josef Fritzl a better person. The injury is compounded for those who would like to have had children but for whatever reason haven’t been able to.

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By Sarah Ditum

In truth, the myth of parental satisfaction is at least half over-compensation. Being a parent is hard. You sacrifice your social life, your sleep, your disposable income, your once-reliable lack of contact with humans waste. Such great cost is more bearable if you can fool yourself that it’s purchased access to knowledge and goodness. But claims of individual illumination hide the fact that bringing up children is a collective enterprise. Lockdown has cut us all off from the collective. And so, the cracks begin to show.

Parents are tired, in a bone-deep, desperate way. Entertaining a small child all day with no nursery, childminder, grandparents or nanny to step in is exhausting — doubly so if you are trying to work from home at the same time. Older ones need homeschooling, and for every parent boasting about their artistic interpretation of the water cycle, there are a dozen whose efforts to explain long division or whatever have dissolved into tantrums (theirs, their children’s, probably both).

Teenagers, at least, are independent enough not to need constant one-on-one attention. But on the flipside, they’re also teenagers – and teenagers who have been effectively grounded for the last two months, with their future swept away in front of them. The relief of cancelled exams gives way to anti-climax. No prom, no post A-level celebrations, no idea when or if life might restart. Many are struggling with it. You would probably not, all things considered, choose one as a housemate if you weren’t related.

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And in among this, the stuff of daily life still needs doing, only all of it made harder. The shopping (but doing the supermarket takes twice as long with careful skirting round the other shoppers). The cleaning (but there’s more mess and dirt than ever, because everyone is in the same space all the time, grubbying it up). It’s like the swim proficiency test when you had to dive for a brick while also wearing pyjamas, only all you’ve done now for weeks and weeks is dive and dive and never surface. That “you” is not unisex: ingrained habits of housework mean all this falls heavier on women than on men in most families.

The reaction of some of the unspawned to all this has not, it’s fair to say, been wildly sympathetic. On Twitter, childless pundits have chipped in gleefully with parenting advice. Doing a lot of chores? You should make a rota (a tip that falls down on the fact that making and managing a rota is plenty of labour on its own).

One commentator magnificently claimed that the more children you have, the easier it gets, because there are more people to share the work. This is, of course, why the typical female executive is a mother of nine.

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Much of this has a tone of you-made-your-bed to it. You wanted children? Well now you’ve got them all the time, and if you really loved them you’d be fine with it. You chose your choice. Part of its cruelty is that it denies parents the space for ambivalence: say you’re happy, or you may say nothing at all. And we should be able to be honest about the fact that parenthood is ambivalent. Its pains and its rewards are tightly poised, particularly for women, which helps to explain why it is that wherever women’s prospects improve, a lower birthrate follows.

Human infants, with their ludicrous and extended dependency, are the work of many adults, whether those ties are of kinship or contracts or simple friendship. It is absurd to treat children as an individual affectation of their parents’, when they are a part of the entire community.

Without at least some babies to grow up into new adults, after all, the whole state begins to topple over. Parents who believe that having children makes them automatically wise are wrong. Non-parents who believe that not having children makes them free are wrong too: we are all tangled up in this together, and there is room for more kindness all round.

The notion that humans are born with an inbuilt collection of social and moral presets, that represent the optimum “natural” way of being human, is deeply influential in our culture. But is it really possible to establish, objectively and scientifically, the best way to ensure a child is raised according to “nature”?

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) the philosopher John Locke argued that rather than (as medieval wisdom had it) being born sinful, infants were in fact tabula rasa — a blank slate. He believed it was the duty of parents to ensure children developed in ways that habituated them to their environment, for example by regularly bathing their feet in cold water so they would not find wet boots unbearable as adults.

Some seven decades later, in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau went considerably further. Children, he said, are not tabula rasa but bearers of divine virtue that is only corrupted by contact with culture. In Emile, or On Education he argued that “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil”. The purpose of child-rearing and education is thus to do as little damage to natural human goodness as possible.

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By Mary Harrington

Are humans blank pages upon which parents should try and write the best possible version of a social being? Or does the introduction of culture corrupt a higher, purer, innate nature? This debate still rages today, across spheres as varied as education and criminal justice, but the most intimate battleground for the ongoing contest between Locke and Rousseau is the so-called “mummy wars”.

On the side of Locke, for example, you see sleep experts such as Richard Ferber or routine advocates such as Gina Ford, who advocate parental authority, structure and boundary-setting to train a child’s habits along lines that will ensure development as flourishing members of their community. On the side of Rousseau, you see William Sears and Sarah Ockwell-Smith, advocates of “gentle” or “attachment” parenting, that “allows the natural, biological attachment-promoting behaviors of the infant and the intuitive, biological, caregiving qualities of the mother to come together”.

This has arisen in tandem with a whole ecosystem of scientific research oriented toward establishing in some definitive way which parenting methods produce the best “outcomes”. As Ellie Lee argues in the 2014 anthology Parenting Culture Studies, since the twentieth century there has been a turn away from the validation of “a mother’s instincts, virtue and affection” toward parenting as a “scientific enterprise”.

It should be noted at this point that the polite euphemism “parenting”, in practice, almost always means “mothering”. I have written previously in these pages about the asymmetric physiological burden of child-rearing; and the main asymmetry, once a child has been gestated and delivered safely, is of course breastfeeding.

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Science is unequivocal about the benefits of breastfeeding. But fathers cannot breastfeed, a non-negotiable biological given that throws down the gauntlet to modern ideals of equal parenting. This poses difficult questions for modern families. Is it best to breastfeed even if it conflicts with mothers’ desire — or need — to work? Is it more feminist and “natural” to embrace the unique biological role of a woman’s body in breastfeeding, or to bottle-feed in the interests of equal parenting?

Even public policy gives mixed messages. Should mothers stay close to their babies or hand them over and go back to work? The NHS promotes breastfeeding via poster campaigns even as breastfeeding services remain under-funded. Meanwhile, family policy across all the main parties focuses on subsidising childcare, and the rising cost of living makes stay at home mothering unaffordable for many on lower incomes.

Positioned as it is on the fault-lines between choice and necessity, biology and culture, breastfeeding also creates an ideal battleground for the conflict between Locke and Rousseau over the best way to raise a child. Should we impose a structure on when babies feed, or encourage breastfeeding on demand?

In this light it was refreshing to read  a study, published in January, that stepped outside the usual parameters of the “mummy wars” — that is, the question of absolute benefit to the baby of a given parenting practice — to look at the social meaning of breastfeeding.

The study explored the different relationships of mothers to breastfeeding in developing and developed economies, as well as across time, to conclude that as well as being a means of feeding a baby, breastfeeding also has sociocultural meaning among mothers themselves, functioning as a site for competition and status-seeking.

In poorer societies where formula milk is expensive and clean water hard to come by, the study showed that breastfeeding is perceived a low-status means of feeding your child. In contrast, in developed societies with ready access to clean water but where staying at home with a baby is unaffordable for many, breastfeeding uptake is far higher among middle and upper class women as it serves to signal wealth.

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Breastfeeding, then, is laden with complex meanings that vary across cultural and economic contexts. And here we can see what the “mummy wars” repeatedly miss out, in their hyperfocus on the authority of science: the dimension of social meaning.

Viewed through the social lens, it becomes clear that supposedly scientific debates about optimum mothering are heavily class-inflected. Consider the two principal UK parenting forums: Mumsnet and Netmums. Spend more than a few minutes browsing the discussions there and it is clear (as articulated in this thread) that the culture of Mumsnet skews middle- to upper-middle-class in its aesthetic and register. Netmums, on the other hand, skews more lower-middle or working-class.

Explore further, and it becomes apparent that Netmums is for Locke, while Mumsnet is more Rousseau. Even mentioning Gina Ford on Mumsnet will get you called “brave”. Indeed, so passionate is the consensus against routine and structure in babycare on among Mumsnetters, that in 2007 Ford herself threatened legal action against the website if its forum members did not stop insulting her. On the more working-class Netmums, by contrast, Gina Ford gets a relatively warm write-up.

Thus a suspicion begins to emerge that notionally scientific parenting questions are in truth vehicles for class and cultural debates. In addition, the middle and upper classes skew toward a liberal, “instinct”-oriented “natural” Rousseauesque philosophy of motherhood, while lower and middle-class mothers are more drawn to a structured, authority-based model. Are there broader political parallels to be drawn?

It is tempting to extrapolate from the class-inflected contest between Rousseau and Locke across Mumsnet and Netmums, and the “open” vs “closed” (or alternatively “Anywhere” and “Somewhere”) tussles evident throughout contemporary politics. To put it another way, Mumsnetters are raising Anywheres, while Netmums are raising Somewheres.

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Does any of this matter? Well, a young mother from a poor background who feels guilted and judged by the middle-class mummies she meets at Sure Start for putting her baby into a routine from birth, so granny can care for her while she works shifts, might well think so.

“There is no such thing as an infant,” wrote paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in 1960, “only a nursing couple”. That is to say, very young children are so absolutely dependent on a caregiver that it makes no sense to speak about a baby in the abstract. It follows from this that it makes no sense to conceive of a baby’s wellbeing as distinct from the wellbeing of its mother. And in that light, whatever the science says, sometimes breast may not be best.

Just as newborns cannot meaningfully be abstracted from their caregivers, nor can humans (perhaps especially babies) meaningfully be abstracted from their social and cultural relations. It is not known what happened to the Inchkeith babies, but a 13^th century version of the same experiment, by the ghoulish Empereror Frederick II, resulted not in the emergence of natural language after all. Rather, the poor infants whom Frederick commanded to be raised with food but no other interaction simply died, presumably of lack of love.

Rather than being a corrupting influence on the intrinsic goodness of infant humans, culture and relationship are as essential to the nourishment of babies as milk and regular sleep. With this in mind, we should stop using science as an ideological stick with which to beat mothers into compliance with Locke, Rousseau or whoever. Maybe instead we could accept that childrearing is an intricate dialogue between biological necessity and cultural meaning.

Rather than treating feeding or nap-time as a proxy for ideological arm-wrestling over the nature of human beings, we can leave families to suit their parenting to their circumstances and – perhaps – even trust that in most cases mother really does know best.

Surely that’s enough information. But, no. “Would you like to try our new Guatemalan blend?” I decline, signalling growing irritation. “Would you like a pastry with that…” A list of various croissants and muffins follows. My mood darkens further. All I want is a bloody coffee.

Choice is the bane of modern life. “Existence precedes essence”, preached the existentialists. What they meant was that who we are is not given at birth, but is constructed by the series of choices we make about who we want to be. “Become who you are”, said Nietzsche some decades before.

From this perspective, life is a never ending succession of choices, a constant work-in-progress of self-definition. We are the authors of our own identity. Mini gods of self-creation. Sartre liked to sit in coffee houses, musing on the meaning of life. But surely even he could not have reckoned with the ubiquity of choice in a consumerist society. I fancy that he, too, would have been broken by the ever-present demand to decide for oneself. As I sip my coffee, a semblance of calm begins to return. Existentialism is too heavy a burden. No more questions, please. I can’t take it any more. I don’t want to be endlessly responsible for me. I want someone else to shoulder the burden on my behalf.

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I was wrestling with this as I read the Children’s Commissioner’s comments about the mental health of our children. There has been a sharp rise recently in the number of children self-harming. There has also been a significant rise over the past few years in the number of children seeking help from psychiatrists. Why are our kids so unhappy? Various answers have been touted. The use of social media is an obvious one. So, too, is the collapse of community life. Both of these are important.

But I also suspect that the way we have come to treat children as mini-consumers, little choice-centres, also has something to do with it as well. For nowhere is this choice-inducing anxiety more toxic than in childhood. It used to be that childhood operated under instruction. For the child, life was a series of givens. And this functioned as a sort of emotional security. But now that we are inducting our children into this culture of choice at an ever-earlier age, we deprive them of the necessary scaffolding of care, love and support.

It’s a big claim, I know. But it is worth reminding ourselves of an important aspect of our culture of choice: that it absolves people of a responsibility of care towards others. To put it another way, our culture of choice contains this message: I am not responsible for you because you are responsible for you. Are you fat? That’s your choice. Smoke? Your choice. In debt? Your decisions have got you into trouble. It’s all on you.

It is one thing to take this attitude towards adults. But our culture is so saturated with this culture of choice that it has come to apply even to children. I am ashamed to admit that my two year old could operate a remote control almost before he could walk. And instead of presenting him with his tea, I now ask him what he wants. It’s almost as if the poor boy has a menu in hand before he can even read it. Choose, we demand. “What do you want?”

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The truth is, he doesn’t really know. And choice is bewildering. Frightening even. Especially if you are asked to bear responsibility for the consequences of the choices that you have made. “You said you wanted sausages, so now you must eat them.” To make children constantly choose is to abdicate one’s responsibility for being a parent. To put it bluntly and provocatively: respecting the decision-making autonomy of a child is tantamount to a refusal of love.

The reductio ad absurdum of this overblown culture of choice is the case of a man who is currently taking his parents to court because he didn’t choose to be born. Yes, it’s true. A businessman from Mumbai, Raphael Samuel, 27, is suing his parents because he didn’t ask to be born. Apparently, by conceiving him without his consent, they were infringing his ‘right’ to choose.

I know his is hardly a serious case, but it does highlight this nonsense of thinking that we can generate ourselves through a succession of our own choices. No, we begin life as if we are already “thrown” (to use a word favoured by Heidegger) into a place and time, with parents and grandparents, within a particular language and culture. Our circumstances precede who we are. They are a necessary given.

The word they use in theological college about the process of “becoming who you are” is formation. In this context, formation is achieved by acclimatising oneself to a tradition that stands over and against one’s individual choices. Indeed, it is only by recognising that one is situated within a given set of values that precede who we are that we are enabled to make the very choices that have come to define adult responsibility. The unchosen is a precondition of the very possibility of choice. No one makes choices in a vacuum. That makes as much sense as putting your hands on your own waist and trying to lift yourself up.

For the last 30 or so years – at least since Thatcherism – choice has become a sort of cuckoo value, pushing out all other values in the nest. And choice places all the burden of responsibility on the individual chooser. In parallel to this development, paternalist politics is now deemed a terrible imposition upon our freedom. Unfortunately, we have begun to think the same way about paternalistic parenting. That’s crazy. For paternalistic is exactly what parenting should be.

1. Build a university in the North to rival MIT

Most of the debate surrounding the UK’s North/South divide has focused on things such as hard infrastructure and transport deficits. But since the industrial revolution, what the North has really lacked is software, not hardware – there aren’t enough people with MAs and PhDs working in key areas such as applied technology.

Evidence suggests that the presence of tertiary degree holders and applied tech universities (such as MIT) is decisive in reducing wider economic imbalances. So let’s think big and put a brand new, massively-endowed applied tech university in the middle of the North.

Why a new one? Because most northern universities are not focused on applied technology, are not high enough in the world rankings, and are too path-dependent to shift at the scale and pace required. The model should echo Imperial College London’s: the university was founded in 1907 (around 800 years after Oxford) because the UK was afraid its scientific research would fall behind Germany’s. Thanks to support from the government (and the royal family, of course) Imperial became one of the world’s elite universities.

Let’s show similar ambition for the North.

2. Boost home ownership by collaborating with charities

A new ‘guaranteed buyer model’ for the UK housing market has long been promoted by my think tank, ResPublica. We suggest that not-for-profits and the private or public sector should join forces to buy homes at scale, then rent them out long-term.

This would create an investment surplus, which could be used for the public good. For example, the prices of a third of the houses could be frozen, until their tenants can afford to buy them. The proceeds from these purchases could then be reinvested, and the model repeated over and again. With the remaining houses, the aim would be for not-for-profits to buy out the other parties – meaning that, if publicly funded, the model would only temporarily contribute to public debt, without adding to the deficit.

Implementing this model could stimulate the construction of tens of thousands of additional homes each year, since the market only builds what it can immediately sell. Thus we’d address the true problem that limits housing supply: the limited speed and scale of construction.

This guaranteed buyer scheme would offer security to those whom the market has doomed to be nothing but renters for the rest of their lives.

3. Give the regions economic autonomy

If we are serious about tacking regional inequality, then we have to do more than simply sigh and say it’s an inevitable consequence of London’s success. As Professor Phillip McCann put it after an exhaustive survey, “the UK is one of the most interregionally unequal countries in the industrialised world”. This problem is serious: it’s time for macro-economic solutions.

As the Northern Powerhouse Partnership recently argued, devolving road taxes – such that fuel tax and exercise duty could be replaced with road price charging – could raise £8 billion for the North. Imagine what bolder measures might achieve.

We’ve already conceded and devolved powers to the home nations: Northern Ireland can now reduce its Corporate Tax rate; Scotland can vary its income tax rate. Let’s combine both these powers and offer them to the English regions (some of which, after all, are more populous than the other nations in the UK). Let them compete for the businesses they need – and, to make the regions even more attractive, let the costs of any relocation be 100% tax deductible. That might finally allow us to create the fiscal platform we need to tackle our extreme regional inequalities.

4. Ensure everyone has the chance to skill up

In the UK, we over-invest at scale in the 50% of young people who go to university, and effectively abandon the rest as they take the poorly-funded vocational path. Then, we as a country never offer anybody any training ever again – unless you get so far from the labour market that you’re classed as insecure or vulnerable. This is a woeful approach.

Though the returns on education are falling, skills still boost wages by 10% – and productivity by far more. Yet post-university – and despite the coming epochal, AI-driven shift in the labour market – we have no national programme to address the vast, diverse, increasing need for skill and training opportunities.

Britain’s overall skills base lags behind many comparable countries, as a forthcoming ResPublica paper  points out, coming 24th out of 34 OECD countries for intermediary skills. Overall, the UK’s profile suggests the nation struggles “to meet the requirements of the technologically advanced sectors”.

We need a national, modular, employer-specific training programme – one which, based on innovation projections, promotes future skills. And it should be accessible to all: mothers returning from childcare, workers wishing to retrain, and young people who never went to university but want to secure jobs that require specific skills.

5. Lighten the financial burdens on new parents

The birth and care of young children puts parents under enormous pressure. Some manage by stopping work – giving up income to become full-time caregivers. Others outsource care to a nursery, which is often astronomically expensive – for themselves or, if the child is over the age of three, for the state.

But at the moment, single-earner households in the UK are the most heavily taxed in the OECD. Rates for such families are 70% higher than for comparable families in France, and 15 times higher than those in Germany. In the UK, just when young families are under the most pressure, we press parents between a rock and a hard place.

Better to offer a genuine choice to parents – following the example of Germany, where parents can choose to remain at home during their child’s earliest years. Perhaps one of the simplest and swiftest ways to support single-earner families is to allow the full transfer of the stay-at-home spouse’s tax-free allowance  to the one who is working, during the first three years of a newborn’s life.

Unlike the pitifully small Marriage Tax Allowance, such measures would genuinely make a difference.

Click here to compare Phillip Blond’s pledge card with the others in our Beyond Brexit series.

Surely that’s enough information. But, no. “Would you like to try our new Guatemalan blend?” I decline, signalling growing irritation. “Would you like a pastry with that…” A list of various croissants and muffins follows. My mood darkens further. All I want is a bloody coffee.

Choice is the bane of modern life. “Existence preceeds essence”, preached the existentialists. What they meant was that who we are is not given at birth, but is constructed by the series of choices we make about who we want to be. “Become who you are”, said Nietzsche some decades before.

From this perspective, life is a never ending succession of choices, a constant work-in-progress of self-definition. We are the authors of our own identity. Mini gods of self-creation. Sartre liked to sit in coffee houses, musing on the meaning of life. But surely even he could not have reckoned with the ubiquity of choice in a consumerist society. I fancy that he, too, would have been broken by the ever-present demand to decide for oneself. As I sip my coffee, a semblance of calm begins to return. Existentialism is too heavy a burden. No more questions, please. I can’t take it any more. I don’t want to be endlessly responsible for me. I want someone else to shoulder the burden on my behalf.

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I was wrestling with this as I read the Children’s Commissioner’s comments about the mental health of our children. There has been a sharp rise recently in the number of children self-harming. There has also been a significant rise over the past few years in the number of children seeking help from psychiatrists. Why are our kids so unhappy? Various answers have been touted. The use of social media is an obvious one. So, too, is the collapse of community life. Both of these are important.

But I also suspect that the way we have come to treat children as mini-consumers, little choice-centres, also has something to do with it as well. For nowhere is this choice-inducing anxiety more toxic than in childhood. It used to be that childhood operated under instruction. For the child, life was a series of givens. And this functioned as a sort of emotional security. But now that we are inducting our children into this culture of choice at an ever earlier age, we deprive them of the necessary scaffolding of care, love and support.

It’s a big claim, I know. But it is worth reminding ourselves of an important aspect of our culture of choice: that it absolves people of a responsibility of care towards others. To put it another way, our culture of choice contains this message: I am not responsible for you because you are responsible for you. Are you fat? That’s your choice. Smoke? Your choice. In debt? Your decisions have got you into trouble. It’s all on you.

It is one thing to take this attitude towards adults. But our culture is so saturated with this culture of choice that it has come to apply even to children. I am ashamed to admit that my two year old could operate a remote control almost before he could walk. And instead of presenting him with his tea, I now ask him what he wants. It’s almost as if the poor boy has a menu in hand before he can even read it. Choose, we demand. “What do you want?”

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The truth is, he doesn’t really know. And choice is bewildering. Frightening even. Especially if you are asked to bear responsibility for the consequences of the choices that you have made. “You said you wanted sausages, so now you must eat them.” To make children constantly choose is to abdicate one’s responsibility for being a parent. To put it bluntly and provocatively: respecting the decision-making autonomy of a child is tantamount to a refusal of love.

The reductio ad absurdum of this overblown culture of choice is the case of a man who is currently taking his parents to court because he didn’t choose to be born. Yes, its true. A businessman from Mumbai, Raphael Samuel, 27, is suing his parents because he didn’t ask to be born. Apparently, by conceiving him without his consent, they were infringing his ‘right’ to choose.

I know his is hardly a serious case, but it does highlight this nonsense of thinking that we can generate ourselves though a succession of our own choices. No, we begin life as if we are already “thrown” (to use a word favoured by Heidegger) into a place and time, with parents and grandparents, within a particular language and culture. Our circumstances precede who we are. They are a necessary given.

The word they use in theological college about the process of “becoming who you are” is formation. In this context, formation is achieved by acclimatising oneself to a tradition that stands over and against one’s individual choices. Indeed, it is only by recognising that one is situated within a given set of values that precede who we are that we are enabled to make the very choices that have come to define adult responsibility. The unchosen is a precondition of the very possibility of choice. No one makes choices in a vacuum. That makes as much sense as putting your hands on your own waist and trying to lift yourself up.

For the last 30 or so years – at least since Thatcherism – choice has become a sort of cuckoo value, pushing out all other values in the nest. And choice places all the burden of responsibility on the individual chooser. In parallel to this development, paternalist politics is now deemed a terrible imposition upon our freedom. Unfortunately, we have begun to think the same way about paternalistic parenting. That’s the crazy. For paternalistic is exactly what parenting should be.