The perils of making your child’s world too perfect

WE LIVE in Nappy Valley Central. The local streets are crammed with strollers, papoosebearing dads and toddlers on scooters. Their parents look on them with delight, scooping them up when they fall or comforting them when another child grabs their ball in the park.

These children are similarly enchanted by their parents, their worlds made all right by the stroke of a hand and a cuddle. For now these parents’ chief concerns are over childcare and sleepless nights.

But as I watch these families, I often think they don’t know what’s coming down the pike.

A generation of young people are now immersed in an epidemic of anxiety and other mental health conditions, with a third claiming to have experience of one disorder or another.

For those parents who could once soothe with a kiss, there is not much worse than seeing your child suffering in this way, sometimes unable to get out of bed, often failing to hold down a job, seemingly incapable of dealing with life.

They’ve been captioned Generation Sicknote in response to newly released figures of the number of 18- to 24-year-olds unable to work because of their mental health. But is much of this problem the fault of parents?

Did our attitudes to parenting not make them robust enough to deal with the real world?

The children of many of my contemporaries have had troubles of this kind – and very often the parents are the most devoted, wishing only to take the very best care of their cherished offspring and solve their problems.

I’m not immune. Even now with my 28-year-old son, if I hear of some dilemma he has, my immediate response is to think that I should be able to resolve it. To be clear, he’s not asking me to: it’s my knee-jerk reaction.

That has been the attitude of many of us to our children. At school, if they were only rubbing along academically, extra tutoring would be commandeered. School holidays were filled with travel and activities so that they were never just hanging around. Their faddy eating was catered for. And once they left school, the Bank of Mum and Dad was open for business. In short, we’ve been doing everything we can to make their lives as easy as possible.

BUT by insulating them from the fact that life is difficult, and that ultimately everyone has to take responsibility for themselves, it’s possible that we have deprived them during their formative years of some important survival skills.

Given that the world is an insecure place, with no guarantees of security, I would caution some of those parents in the park not to think it’s helpful to make their children’s own small world perfect whenever they can. They might be much happier in the long run.