Mollycoddle curse of the middle class

2008-03-02

Children need to be exposed to the real world if they are to becomefully rounded adults rather than overprivileged wets with no social skills

I know a couple of 16-year-old boys who are driven to school every morning by their mothers – to the badass badlands of Hampstead, the leafy north London middle-class enclave, to be precise. Hampstead is served by several bus routes and has a Tube station, but these parents are so concerned about the safety of their strapping sons that these boys have never, to my knowledge, been anywhere on their own.

I grew up in Hampstead. Back then, to my desperate embarrassment, I was a tragic latecomer to public transport: my mother insisted I wait until I was 13 before letting me take the Underground alone.

Many of my friends used it from the age of 10 or so, and no, their parents weren’t careless delinquents. They were middle-class professionals who had the luxury of living through a time when childhood wasn’t considered to be a sort of risk-laden illness and who had faith in the intrinsic goodness of other people, before the phrase “stranger danger” had been invented.

Emulate them today and you’re likely to be considered utterly irresponsible. Mollycod-dling may be farcical, but at least it’s safe.

My friends and I were all allowed to do pretty much the same thing at the same ages: we hung around in packs and all had to be home at a certain time. There was no question of some of us not being allowed out and some of us welcome to stay out all night: things seemed pretty homogenised.

That is no longer true. Having a group of kids over to play is quite a complicated process today. Some children can travel alone, some can’t. Some can go to the park without adult supervision, some not. Some can hang out wherever they like, some have to remain within sight of grown-ups. Some can stay out after dark, some not.

My youngest son, aged 12, claims he is the only child in his class to get himself to and from school using public transport – I say “claims” because I find this so improbable, but he is adamant. He and his brother started taking the Tube to school when he was 10 and a bit and his brother 13; they initially went with some other, older local children.

I don’t just make them use public transport because it’s convenient, quick and cheap and I don’t encourage them to go and explore other bits of London because I want them to get a sense of its geography.

I do it because I don’t want them to become kids who only hang out with their own kind of people and can’t function outside their narrow, native perimeters – the kind of ghastly “privileged” children who bray disparagingly about chavs and scuttle across the road at the merest whiff of an innocent hood, which someone may be wearing because their ears are cold (and I like that my children can sense the difference between good hoods and bad hoods).

I know sitting on the Tube and emerging somewhere that may be unfamiliar isn’t quite the same as hanging in the ghetto, but I don’t want them to hang in the ghetto: I just want them to know how to behave with all sorts of different people, not just ones like themselves, and to me this matters as much as academic achievement.

My youngest son chirpily informed me a fortnight ago that his newest friend from the skate park (which he walks, or skates to, but which some of his friends are chauffeured to by parents who also sit and watch over their galumphing sons as they hang out) “sells weed” – as in mari-juana.

Obviously the maternal heart doesn’t entirely jump for joy at this news, but apparently once the new friend had established that my son wasn’t a customer they just chatted and practised their skate moves, after which the new friend suggested they go back to his for tea.

I may be naive in the extreme, but I call that a good thing. Better surely for a child growing up in a city to find “weed” a fact of life than to live in ignorance of its existence and fall upon it like a starved person at the age of 18? There’s nothing more boring than an 18-year-old who has discovered weed, unless of course it’s a 30-year-old.

I don’t help my children with their homework either, unless they’re really stuck or need testing. I only realised very recently – via a rap on the knuckles from one of my boys’ report card – that I was supposed to and everyone else apparently does. But I am at a loss to see why they need my help: they’re not thick and surely it is a school’s job to educate children on the academic front and to render them competent enough to do their own homework?

And to penalise them if their homework isn’t up to scratch, or if they turn up with the wrong books – especially if attending said school costs an obscene amount of money? I don’t have the time – or frankly the inclina-tion – to check my huge children’s rucksacks in the morning to make sure they’ve packed the right pens or books: the idea seems absurd.

Again I can honestly say that no one in my life ever helped me with homework (or checked my pencil case or books): you just got on with it, and getting on with it was part of learning, as was getting it wrong or getting into trouble.

Much has been written about “helicopter mothers” mollycod-dling their small children – ones who aren’t allowed to play in the local park in case armies of lurking paedophiles jump out and snatch them, or in case there’s a conker-induced fatality – but this whole issue reaches a peak of intensity with the arrival of teenagehood.

I know lots of teenage boys, having some myself, and the ones who have been their parents’ life’s work are easy to spot. Trained and hothoused from infancy, their Mandarin is coming along nicely (Sanskrit, in one case). Their violin is grade 7 or 8. They’re articulate, well travelled, charming. They are also noticeably timorous. As I was saying, some of them are still driven from A to B by their parents in the daytime, even though they’re 6ft tall.

Soon they’ll go on gap years – no longer backpacking round India or Thailand without a mobile phone and with only a Lonely Planet guide to help, but turning up at the plantation or orphanage their parents have paid five grand for them to go and “work” at. There they will meet people exactly like themselves. Then they’ll go to university, and their mothers will do up their student rooms and take away their laundry. They’ll hang out with each other and never take advantage of, or show curiosity in, any person from a different social background. They’ll leave and move into a flat paid for by their parents – or boomerang back home, to the secret relief of their empty-nested mothers – and end up as overeducated adults with no life skills.

This isn’t a crime, but it does seem a shame. This kind of limited trajectory used to be the speciality of certain public schools, which ensured many of their alumni only ever experienced life as a series of comforting and familiar institutions – Eton, Oxford, the House of Commons, for instance, or Ampleforth, Cam-bridge, Rome. A more workaday version of that narrowness of experience is becoming, for many middle-class children, the norm rather than the exception.

With these restrictions on childhood it’s no wonder kids seek refuge in consumerism. They can control what they consume, via “pester power”, even if they can’t control what they do. (Equally, the internet is the only place many overprotected kids have any freedom; this doesn’t always have happy consequences, and you don’t need to be a child psychologist to point out that living a pretend life online instead of engaging with real people in real life is not healthy:see Bridgend.)

I have no idea if my way of raising my children is right or wrong, though I know it’s imperfect: I can only try and remember what it was like being their age and trust to instinct. Maybe not helping with homework is a dreadful mistake; maybe children shouldn’t be exposed to drunk blokes on the Tube or (once, memorably) to flashers; maybe it’s crazy for a 12-year-old to know someone who sells weed.

But if it all goes pear-shaped tomorrow and they turn into monstrous creeps instead of the nice, rounded human beings I was aiming for, I’ll know that their childhood was as normal as I could make it and that I never deliberately clipped their wings. Of course their Sanskrit leaves a lot to be desired – but at least they’re not wet.

ARE YOU OVERCAUTIOUS?

1 It’s your 11-year-old’s first day at secondary school and it’s a two-mile bus ride away. Do you:

a) strap her into the back of a 4X4? After all, you can’t be too careful b) accompany her on public transport and decide to carry on going with her until she is familiar with the route c) shove her out of the door and tell her it does not matter if she gets lost and is late for school?

2 Your 12-year-old wants to meet up with friends to go to a busy shopping complex. Do you: a) escort them there and stick to them like glue b) say she can go, but she has to stay with her friends, keep her mobile on and agree to be home by a certain time c) say: “Good idea – here’s £150. Have fun”?

3 Your 13-year-old asks for help with a school worksheet. Do you: a) dictate all the answers then check his spelling b) direct him to internet sites/reference books c) tell him schoolwork doesn’t matter so why not play with his Wii?

How did you score?

Mostly a No one doubts that you want the best for your child – but you really need to let him have more independence. Mostly b Well done. You are neither irresponsible nor overprotective. Mostly c Your liberal attitudes are not doing your child any favours.

From Times Online. Article by India Knight