Just say no! The art of dodging the jackboot of little dictators
Why coddling kids can ruin their lives
YES, yes, well done, Jamie Oliver. Bravo and all that. He started by taking on Turkey Twizzlers – and now he has set his sights on food advertising, with a campaign that’s lit up the internet.
Celebrities are falling over themselves to take part in #AdEnough, posting selfies covering their eyes as part of Oliver’s bid to get adverts for junk food banned before the 9pm watershed on British TV.
In Ireland, a voluntary code was introduced earlier this year to restrict the targeting of advertising of unhealthy food to children. Celebrity endorsement of unhealthy foods is totally banned. Meanwhile, regulators here are, like Jamie, hoping to introduce at 9pm watershed for the advertising of such foods on TV and radio.
All very noble. After all, we’re in the middle of an obesity epidemic, with one in three children overweight or obese.
But hang on a minute, aren’t we missing something here? There is already a filter between children and non-stop junk food – and it’s called their parents. Really, the issue is not the advertising, but Mum and Dad’s inability to say no to children.
This is a failure of parenting, and is part of a much bigger problem. Too often today, parents feel unable to exert any meaningful control over their children – to insist that they do as they’re told.
While the sentiments behind Oliver’s campaign may be worthy, at its core is an acceptance that parents are now so feeble when it comes to laying down the law, they need the state to step in to remove the problem for them.
Thinking back to my own childhood, the idea that I could simply nag my parents into giving me junk food is laughable. I was given my meal every evening, which I either ate or didn’t.
If I didn’t eat it, then I was hungry until breakfast, so fairly quickly, I learned to eat whatever was put in front of me. Fast food was a very occasional treat.
The issue is bigger than food, however. Society seems increasingly to be shifting to a position where children can’t be challenged.
So they get what they want, even though they don’t always know what’s best for them and cannot really be expected to.
What worries me is that these big social shifts can have a profound impact on the psychological development of the next generation. In China, for example, there is a wellknown phenomenon called Little Emperor Syndrome, which was the result of mainland China’s onechild policy.
Increasing spending-power combined with increased attention from parents and grandparents produced an over-entitled generation who lacked discipline or self-control.
These only children have been described as ‘little dictators’ because they are so used to always getting their own way – and I worry this is what we’re starting to see now. A generation of spoilt, emotionally dysfunctional and entitled people who lack grit and, instead, feel the world owes them.
They can’t tolerate any opinion that differs from their own, so used are they to adults hanging on their every word. They think they are always right, and that everyone should listen to them.
Recently, I was speaking to a senior manager in a big finance firm, who said companies now face real difficulties in knowing how to deal with graduate employees.
‘They don’t want to be told they’re wrong,’ he said with a sigh. ‘They think their opinions are as important as someone who has been doing the job for 20 years.
MOST of them are too fragile and precious to last, he added. ‘They don’t accept hierarchy, and they all think they’re special and more important than they are. They refuse to do tasks they deem boring because they think it’s beneath them.’
Not only is this leading to a generation intolerant of others’ views (bad news for the rest of us), it means they are unable to cope when their own lives don’t go as they expect. We do our children no favours by mollycoddling them. The world can be harsh, with plenty of disappointments. Children need to learn how to deal with such setbacks – it’s a vital life skill.
While it might be easy to give in to the demands of children, in the long term, we’re sending out entirely the wrong message and damaging a whole generation.