You know you’re getting on a bit when you spend your Friday evening lamenting: the problem with kids these days… Last week I went for dinner with my friend C—, and over a curry we discussed – prompted, as is 95 per cent of conversation nowadays, by Adolescence – what future might await her young children, and how she can keep them safe. To what extent should she allow them to make their own mistakes, to find their own way? How much parental oversight is vital for well-being; when does it tip into the kind that spurs rebellion? These are not new questions, but the world has irrevocably changed since my parents asked them about me.
It is quite likely they never really had to: I was on the whole a self-parenting type of kid, keenly aware of my responsibilities to myself and others, always setting myself extracurricular projects, desperate to please my teachers – in other words, a bit of a loser. But “it was just in my nature to be well-behaved” is not the sort of helpful advice C— was after.
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