That judge was right about snowflakes. We’ve turned into a nation of whiny milksops

RIDICULOUS beauty question of the week: Would you tattoo your whole face with semipermanent foundation? Tattooed eyebrows are bad enough, but a painful perma-face of full-on slap? The only sensible answer is ‘No’.

AJUDGE has said children must not be brought up as coddled snowflakes, unable to walk across a street themselves — but is it already too late for all that?

Judge Rupert Lowe was speaking out after hearing how a divorced father had refused to let his children ( aged eight and nine) walk 100 metres from his car to their mother’s home in Gloucester.

Instead, Extra- Careful Dad breached a restraining order by driving the precious little darlings to within 30 metres of their mum’s front door.

‘But they know the way, don’t they?’ asked the judge incredulously, adding that he feared overprotective modern parenting is harmful because it stops children from learning how to ‘live a life’.

He also said he wasn’t surprised so many kids today complain about anxiety and depression.

He has a point. Agreed! For a start, fresh air hurts no one.

And being ferried around like a Faberge egg, cocooned from the vagaries of weather and the outside world, cannot be good for anyone, especially not the little ones, with their half- formed psyches and noses buried in their iPads all the time.

How will the little horrors learn about stranger danger, self-reliance, nature or even the joys of a puddle if they only breathe air-con and view life from a car window? No one wants them growing up in a vacuum, all withered and weird and oddly entitled, like an Elon Musk, Britney or a Beckham.

Of course, walking to school is not the answer to society’s ills, but surely it has to be a healthy first step on life’s journey? And if a child cannot walk or take public transport to school, independent travel in other areas of their schedule should be encouraged. Consider that in 1971, 80 per cent of children walked to school, but by last year, said the judge, it was only 25 per cent.

That makes me feel absolutely ancient, like a crone in a bonnet and bustle from another age. Even from primary level we all walked to school ourselves; through howling gales and snowdrifts, in heatwaves and in rain storms.

We walked through Scottish winters when it was dark in the mornings and dark when we trudged back home at 4pm.

We walked in summers without recourse to applications of suncream, without constant parental contact via a mobile phone or without regular hydration from fancy bottled waters flavoured with a hint of lychee.

Without any kind of hydration at all, come to think of it, except maybe a disgusting slurp from the manky drinking fountain in the school playground on the two days in the year when the temperature rose above bracing.

And we even did it without being comforted by a barrage of sustaining yet nutritious kale-rich snacks packed each morning by our loving mothers. If you got half a Wagon Wheel and a clip around the ear, you were lucky.

And don’t forget — I’m warming to my theme here — there was no thermal clothing for kiddies back then; no lovely, padded winter puffer coats with fur linings and no fleecy insulated anoraks.

Our only protection against the elements were woolly tights — girls had to wear skirts back then, while little boys’ knees turned blue in their shorts — and duffel coats that offered little protection in a morning blizzard. They just got heavier and heavier as the storms raged on, and smelled more and more like wet dog.

HATE to come over all super-virtuous here, but Captain Scott and his polar expeditions would instinctively have recognised the trials of the average 1970s British schoolkid, plodding through a white- out with only their wellies and a pair of mittens on a string to protect them from the elements.

It was the same for everyone; generations of us who grew up without central heating or being the centre of attention all the time — children who were expected to suffer a little and get on with it a lot. And it did none of us any harm at all.

Now it seems that schools close down at the first hint of a snowflake, literally and meteorologically. And it is not just children who are mollycoddled — it is everyone.

When offence isn’t being taken at everything, grievances are being nursed and selfish behaviour is indulged.

We’ve turned into a first-world nation of whiny milksops, a place where Government ministers can’t do their jobs because the first time they tell a civil servant to buck up their ideas, they are accused of bullying. A place where people don’t want to work in offices any more because, do you know what, WFH is so much nicer and relaxing, and you can just snuggle when no one is looking. A place where a video of a crying young woman on TikTok went viral because she complained about the constraints of her 9 to 5 job.

‘How do you have time for life?’ she whined. A follower agreed. ‘The 40- hour work week is beyond outdated and your feelings are totally valid,’ she said.

What is going on out there? This sense of entitlement, that all good things should pass your way and arrive without effort or hardship, is becoming all-pervasive.

But the truth is that no one ever got anywhere worth going in life without working damn hard to get there. So you might as well pull on your wellies and get on with the struggle, even if you are only eight years old. Correction: especially if you are only eight years old.

In my day, we were sent to school with half a Wagon Wheel and a clip round the ear if we were lucky