Pushover parents
Am I raising a spoilt brat?
Something my 19-year-old daughter Nell said last week stopped me in my tracks and made me question nearly three decades of motherhood.
I was giving her the third lift of the day – she’s wrecked her car, we live out in the country in Somerset, and the bus takes about an hour to cover three miles. Neither of us is especially pleased by the current arrangement. Not me, because it’s knocked my weekend lie-ins on the head, not to mention the option of sinking half a bottle of merlot with my dinner; not her, because now there is no escape from my thrice-daily homilies. Lifts and life-coaching, in one handy Mum package.
As with 99 per cent of our conversations, Nell was talking absorbedly about Nell. Specifically, about the cost of a replacement car, the prohibitive rise in her insurance, and – the bit I was waiting for – the fact that I needed to cough up some cash pronto. “I can’t afford the insurance, and go travelling this year, and pay Honey’s livery,” she said.
I emergency-braked, pulled over and stared at her. “You are nineteen!” I said. “At your age, I was supporting myself on less than the cost of your phone contract! I didn’t have a car or a holiday until I was in my late-twenties and had a full-time job! I never asked my parents for money! I am a single mother on a modest income! I have never had a pony! I am not Lady Grantham!”
To be fair, she earned that pony through grafting at the local trekking centre from the age of 13. She rises at 7.30 every morning to muck out the animal’s stable, though no bribe or threat on this earth would induce her to tidy her own room. And she’s working at the local pub to fund her travels, so she’s not a leech. She’s just a millennial. A millenni-Nell.
Like her older brothers (Tom, 26, and Ben, 27), she is a sweet-natured and capable kid. So why is she so thoughtless, selfish and juvenile when it comes to her dealings with me? I work full-time; we share our home. Yet I seem to be the only one who ever cleans, cooks dinner or does the laundry. I’d accuse her of treating the house like a hotel, if she ever paid any rent.
Other friends in their fifties cite similar scenarios. Charlotte’s tribe “expect everything but do nothing”. Liv’s have no patience: “Whatever they want – cars, clothes, phones, food, holidays – they want it now.”
More than half of milliennials themselves agree they’re selfabsorbed, and nearly as many admit to being greedy, according to a 2015 Pew Research survey. But do we only have ourselves to blame?
Back in the Sixties, my mother didn’t have a washing machine, let alone a dishwasher, so finding the time to worry about my psychological wellbeing as well would have seemed laughable. We were left to cry, smacked if we were naughty, expected to amuse ourselves and – from an early age – to help our parents around the house. And yes, I do realise that this is hardly Angela’s Ashes – but do you know any child raised like that today?
By contrast, mine was the most enlightened parenting generation of all time – we devoured child psychology books, exhausted ourselves fitting around our infants’ sleep patterns, and spent every waking hour obsessing over their happiness. We were by their cot at the first kitten-like mewl. Toddler tantrums were analysed, rather than sensibly dealt with. Our pint-sized tyrants only had to raise their pudgy fists and we were sprinting to the
‘I’d accuse her of treating the house like a hotel, if she ever paid any rent’
‘No wonder some of them never quite got the hang of standing on their own two feet’
fridge for fromage frais with a speed that would shame Mo Farah. Instant gratification was the name of the game.
Speaking of games, remember Pass the Parcel? Not the brutal, nail-biting version of my youth, where just one gift was buried under the final layer of wrapping, but the puny Nineties one, when every parcel had to contain a gift for everyone. Heaven help the father operating the Fisher-Price tape player if he failed to stop the music track for every single tiny guest.
And the children’s party ante only kept getting upped: a few years after my kids left primary school, one mother I knew invited 10 children to Disneyland Paris for a long weekend. This, on top of the daily grind of scheduling playdates and sleepovers between Kumon maths, Mandarin classes and judo.
Even the least helicopter-minded of us was hardwired to inject structure and stimulation into every second of our child’s day; no wonder some of them never quite got the hang of either when they were eventually required to stand on their own feet.
As Peter Gray, research professor in the Department of Psychology at Boston College, wrote recently in Psychology Today, children “learn the most important lessons in life from other children, not from adults” – and yet in we weighed, hell-bent on cushioning them from every conceivable blow.
We didn’t trust them to survive the slings and arrows of childhood, we made them the centres of our universe and encouraged them to think they could have it all – in short, we taught them to be selfish. Meanwhile, everything they were exposed to on TV and online shored up the belief that the good life was a standard issue, inalienable right.
Nell was indignant when I told her about this article. “Condescendingly accusing younger generations of being entitled, narcissistic and lazy is nothing new,” she snapped. “But what makes promoting this stereotype even worse is the knowledge that my friends and I are facing a lower relative starting wage – thanks to the fallout of a financial crash we played no part in creating – a housing market that’s pretty much impenetrable, and everincreasing university tuition fees.”
Fair point. According to think tank The Resolution Centre, millennials earn a fifth less than we did at their age, yet by the time they’re 30 they will have spent £40,000 more on rent and be 50 per cent less likely than we were to own their own home. No wonder that 48 per cent of 20- to 24-year-olds still live at home – a percentage that’s been steadily rising since Nell was born.
Turns out that we protected our children against everything except the future, which is what is keeping them “kippers” – kids in parents’ pockets. That said, would it kill them to make us a cup of tea while they’re there?