Generation of fathers fall down by refusing to teach discipline

This weekend, we had a family lunch to celebrate my mother’s birthday. Unfortunately, I forgot to tell our eldest boy, 14, who’d already made plans. I asked him to cancel and a row ensued — with the inevitable: “I hate you!”. But he accompanied us to the restaurant, behaved beautifully and later confessed he’d had “fun”. I told him that we loved his company, he’d made Grandma happy, but that next time I’d be sure to give him more notice.

It would have been easier, of course, to avoid incurring my son’s wrath by letting him skip the lunch. But in my heart, I knew it would have been wrong.

Certainly, Barnaby Lenon, the ex-headmaster of Harrow, is on my side. He believes that too many boys are grossly underperforming, falling behind and getting into trouble because too many fathers want to be their son’s best friends and fail to enforce the discipline that boys need to thrive.

In his book, Much Promise, to be published this month, he states: “Boys need disciplining by schools and parents. They need it … and, what is more, they can take it.” Lenon suggests that because we have handed over so much authority to our children, we have to negotiate with them as we do our friends, and discipline has collapsed with it.

This is hard to argue with. From David Beckham and his son Brooklyn getting joint tattoos, like a pair of mates on a stag weekend, to dads I know who send their 14-year-old boys to parties with bottles of vodka, my generation don’t seem comfortable with being the father figure who knows right from wrong, rather than the best friend.

In my experience of raising boys in a leafy part of London, this laissez-faire trend is becoming endemic because of the way we live now. Fathers of my generation are less formal, yet probably more separate from our children than we have ever been. Where once we worked and hunted together, now we often feel like strangers who share little more than the same postcode.

Part of the problem is my generation’s reluctance to grow up. We might have jobs and families, but we also need to be personally fulfilled — our kids are often at clubs or socialising, while we’re off playing golf or riding bikes. This leaves little time for the old-school humdrum family life. In the very brief moments we assemble as a family, we dearly want the experience to be fun, not fraught, as if this is another “success” box that must be ticked.

A friend, a city accountant, is typi-

Be loving, but in charge and consistent: Diana Baumrind, parenting expert at University of California, Berkeley, showed that children who are not set consistent boundaries, whose parents feel they need to please them rather than teach them to be responsible, raise children who are more insecure and demanding and who have little self-discipline. Boys need disciplining by schools and parents. They need it … and, what is more, they can take it.” Barnaby Lenon, the ex-headmaster of Harrow, writing in his book

MuchPromise