Parents behaving badly

Second, guilt. We are not only indulging our children to the hilt, we are indulging ourselves and we know it. Perhaps we try to make up for our emotional neglect and cowardice by throwing money at our children and fussing about stuff that doesn’t matter. Parents - particularly middle class ones - have never spent more time and energy fussing over their children's diets and our children have never been fatter.

Third, we are terrified. We worry about the world we have created for our children and as we no longer have confidence in our own ability to navigate it, understandably we have correspondingly little confidence in our children’s ability to find their way. Our own anxiety about the world causes us to see our children as fragile and vulnerable, when, in fact, it is ourselves who are feeling out of control.

If, as M. Scott Peck says, love is not a feeling but an action, maybe the best thing we could do for our children is stop indulging our overwhelming feelings of love and start acting in ways that are more likely to help them in the long run.

If we could just stop using our children to manage our own anxiety about the world, and start doing our job by judiciously and slowly allowing them to experience reality - to take risks and survive them - then, perhaps, they would have some chance of successfully completing their own job, and really grow up.

At the moment, the world is full of fully grown children who have never been allowed to be ordinary, who have been protected from failure, hurt and danger to an obsessive extent. We keep them indoors because of a fantasy danger - the abductor, the pedophile, the nasty stranger - and therefore make them much more susceptible in the long run to such real dangers as obesity, hardening of the arteries, high blood pressure and heart disease.

Doctors already speculate that our children may be the first generation in history to have a shorter lifespan than their parents.

One of the reasons fairy tales are grim (in name and nature) is because they prepare children for the inevitable dangers they will one day face. It is safe danger, if you like, play danger, but children both need it and are strong enough to cope with it.

When we decide to protect our children from other children, when we decide to expose them only to people of the same class, religious and ethnic background, when we teach them, by our actions and our free floating anxiety that the world is dangerous and to be feared, with the very noblest of intentions, we do a terrible thing.