Boris proves ignoring your children can be good for them

WHETHER you like or loathe Boris Johnson — and I confess to a sneaking affection, against my better judgment — there’s no doubt he’s one of life’s great survivors.

The same is true of his sister, Rachel, who certainly made enemies during her editorship of The Lady magazine — chief among them the owner’s formidable mother, Mrs Budworth, whose public denunciations of her and her shortcomings would have finished off most normal people. Far from being cowed, however, Rachel continues not merely to thrive, but to prosper.

It’s easy to assume that the reason the Johnson clan — there are six siblings in total, all of whom went to top public schools and then on to Oxford — have done so well is because of their privileged background.

And certainly that helps. But there are plenty of 30-and fortysomethings with similarly top-flight upbringings who have failed to live up to their advantages or their early promise.

No, the real secret behind the Johnson tribe’s success lies in their childhood, which, as Rachel has revealed this week, was a triumph of ‘unparenting’. In short, she and her siblings, she says, were largely ignored by their parents, who based the family in Belgium, where her father worked for the European Commission.

They were never given a choice of what to eat or supplied with so much as a playdate, let alone any of the childcentred outings so lovingly planned by modern parents.

FAR from being hovered over protectively, from the age of ten and 11 respectively she and Boris would be deposited at Brussels’ Gare du Nord with their school trunks at the end of the holidays and left to make their own way to their boarding prep school in Sussex, which entailed two changes of train and encounters with some distinctly dodgy characters.

Those experiences afforded them an education that was every bit as valuable as anything they learned in the classroom. It taught them to be independent and to think for themselves, rather than relying on an adult’s instruction.

My own childhood — while not nearly so grand — was similarly independent and largely unsupervised.

Like Rachel and Boris, my father worked abroad (in our case in Cologne, Germany). Well before I reached my teens, I spent my spare time reading or going out, sometimes with a friend, often alone.

I still remember the creepy man who came up to me at the top of the city’s magnificent Dom cathedral, which I’d decided to visit alone one day, and said quietly: ‘It’s a long way down, isn’t it?’

I scarpered down those ancient, narrow steps as fast as my eight-year- old legs would carry me.

Did I even tell my mother? I can’t recall, but I do know that experience made me wary of strangers without damaging me in the slightest. Did I try to give my own children a similar childhood? Alas, no — but I suspect most mothers of my age and younger feel the same way, caught between a desire to give our children independence and a gnawing fear of what will happen to them if we do.

The irony is that despite all our best efforts to provide our children with more, we’re actually giving them less of what they need: the confidence to live without us and the resilience to cope when things go wrong.

By keeping them on a leash, we deprive them of their independence. By providing constant activities, we stultify their imagination. And by supplying them with expensive technology — from the latest Nintendo or Xbox to their laptops and iPods, we fail to teach them perhaps the greatest lesson of all: delayed gratification.

I’m afraid we also make childhood a lot less fun. It’s no coincidence that most successful children’s novels dispense with adults almost immediately: adventure and fun only really happen when you’re left to your own devices.

I’m sure the freedom my parents gave me was far more beneficial than any amount of Tiger Mothering.

Deep down, we know what we should really do: step back and allow our children to be bored, to take risks and make mistakes.

All they need in return is the knowledge they’re loved not for what we hope they will become, but for who they are.

We don’t need to produce our own versions of Rachel or Boris (one of each in the world is more than enough). We simply need to encourage our children to believe in themselves.