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If you’re wondering why we aren’t hearing more complaints from the boomers about the spread of social justice activism from the campus to the world, don’t. The generation hitting the streets are doing exactly what those parents raised them to do: dismantle authority while embracing authoritarianism. But it’s making them miserable.
The story dates back some years. In 1517, the German monk Martin Luther is said to have nailed his ’95 Theses’ to the door of the Wittenberg Castle church. Among the arguments in this document, one of the foundational texts of Protestant Christianity, was the claim that the faithful don’t need tradition, custom or religious authorities to access the word of God, as it’s all there in the Bible.
This signalled a turning away from the general belief that you should rely on kings, priests or other human, worldly authority figures to tell you what was right. Don’t submit to them, Luther argued, read the biblical texts.
Some five centuries on, this anti-authority revolution has gone well beyond Christianity. Today it is hard to think of a mainstream cultural or institutional arena where it’s not generally accepted that authority and tradition should be questioned, challenged and if possible superseded.
First as Nonconformists and then as general non-conformists, we’ve moved beyond questioning the authority of the Catholic church to questioning the Christian church full stop. Having run out of priests and doctrines there, we’ve moved on to questioning everything from history, teachers and Boy Scouts to fathers, and all that lies in between. The aim has evolved somewhat; whereas Luther was concerned with what he saw as a more authentic faith, today we’re agitating for freedom from anything that hasn’t been freely chosen. One Mumbai antinatalist, Raphael Simons, even proposed suing his parents for having him without his consent.
This collapse of faith in authority poses a particular challenge to liberal parents. One Washington Post writer frames it: “I’m A Die-Hard Liberal. It Ruined My Parenting.” If you believe all humans are (or should be) as free as possible, then how does that apply to children? When children are neither fully rational nor capable of full independence, how does the doctrine of human freedom apply?
For one thing, liberal views make it harder to order your kids about. According to Pew Research, the more liberal parents are, the less emphasis they place on obedience in their children. Only 35% of consistently liberal American parents believe in teaching their kids obedience, compared to 68% of consistently conservative parents. Anyone who believes passionately in freedom for everyone will struggle with the prospect of telling your children to do as they’re told ‘because I said so’.
They say there are no atheists in foxholes. Even the most right-on anti-authoritarian will drop the metaphysics and do Commanding Mummy Voice when a toddler runs into the path of an oncoming bus. But for those truly committed to the enterprise of freedom, a whole subculture of ‘child-led’ parenting practices has grown up. It’s full of advice to mothers on how to remain available so your child can breastfeed whenever he likes, stop breastfeeding at her own initiative rather than mummy’s, offer a range of weaning food for free choice rather than mush on a spoon, sleep in your bed for as long as they like and so on.
At the radical end of this child-led style lies ‘unschooling’, which takes the view that the structures of education themselves constitute an unacceptable impingement on a child’s autonomy, and that education is better and more effectively pursued by supporting the child to follow their own interests. Such approaches are common targets of conservative ire: the Daily Mail loves to make a spectacle of parents who devote themselves to their children’s absolute freedom, or inveigh at liberal parents raising a generation of ‘little horrors’.
What’s often missing from this critique, though, is the fact that this focus on freedom doesn’t in fact remove parents from the picture. Quite the opposite. ‘Child-led’ parenting is labour-intensive. I have mum friends who spend hours singing, back-rubbing or breastfeeding their pre-schoolers every night, because in their view imposing a bedtime boundary on their kids was in some profound way morally wrong. It’s also time-consuming: I remember once watching in bafflement as one especially anti-authoritarian friend waited patiently for her 18-month-old baby to put her arms voluntarily into a bib before starting tea. (It took a while.)
The upshot of this is a child who can’t easily be raised by a village. If parenting is a matter of being constantly present and attuned to your child’s needs, and following their lead at all times, then how can a mother ever be elsewhere, or doing anything else?
In effect, then, the shadow side of freedom-focused child-rearing is micromanagement. In this, unschoolers share an affinity with another contemporary parenting approach more commonly associated with micromanagement: ‘helicopter parents’. Unschoolers and helicopter parents are both, are in different ways, inheritors of Luther’s tradition: the former fixated on freedom, the latter on salvation through applying the Protestant work ethic, and both pursuing their aims through a pervasive presence in their kids’ lives. In both cases, too, we see an abdication of authority, in favour either of radical libertarianism or a kind of cuddly, enmeshed totalitarianism.
Parents are thus echoing in family life what’s going on in the wider culture. Our individualising and privatising of family life echoes a parallel collapse of social norms, institutions and shared values under the modern questioning of authority. And as Patrick Deneen has argued, the fewer shared social norms we have, the more the state must intervene to ensure order and social harmony. In the state, as in the nursery, freedom and tyranny are two sides of the same coin.
The standard conservative harrumph about kids today, whether at home or rioting in the streets, is that they should just be made to do as they’re told. But in practice, at least as a parent, it doesn’t really work like this. Evidence suggests that punitively authoritarian parenting is associated with bad behaviour and psychological difficulties in children, something echoed recently by Met police chief Cressida Dick to much Right-wing anger.
The more nurturing ‘helicopter’ style of absolutist parenting doesn’t fare much better, with children raised by helicopter parents showing trouble controlling their emotions in childhood and early adolescence. Nor does this resolve when they grow up, with one study showed such children struggle to self-regulate as adults. They also lack confidence in their own agency – that is, their ability to affect their lives or environments. Perhaps unsurprisingly, having grown accustomed to intrusive and ever-present authority in family life, helicopter-parented young adults also express higher than usual support for surveillance and nanny-state policies.
Others have drawn a link between social-justice discourse of ‘safety’ and ‘harm’ and risk-averse, highly involved modern approaches to raising kids. But unlike Jonathan Haidt, I’m unconvinced that a front-brain, rationalist solution is the answer when the heart of the problem isn’t a rational one.
I’ve long since learned that when my three-year-old is crying uncontrollably, the quickest and kindest solution is not to offer choices, reasoning or punishment but a big hug and confident authority. When I trained and practiced as a psychotherapist, my experience was that this human yearning for kindness mixed with authority isn’t exclusive to children. It wasn’t unusual to meet a client who would try to bend the ‘rules’, test limits, sometimes get very angry at me — only to acknowledge some time later the relief they found in neither succeeding nor being punished for testing boundaries. But if all someone encounters when pushing back is empty space, they will push still harder, and with growing fear.
Two women are screaming at the cops outside the White House. pic.twitter.com/V9wTsoFDzf
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) June 23, 2020
Mixed with the real-world conditions driving today’s increasingly mutinous politics, I see young adults behaving exactly as they were raised to behave, having grown up amid the endgame of our rebellion against authority. Dysregulated activists screaming at authority figures, as though begging a parent to relent. Debates about ‘systemic’ oppression that none of us can fix (because we have no control over anything in our lives), but which must be tackled by authoritarian means anyway. A politics of harm and safety. It leaves me wondering just how much fear and distress lies under relentless search for a boundary, any boundary, that might offer some resistance.
It also leaves me deeply pessimistic about the future. Because while I can contain my own young daughter’s distress with a mix of love and appropriate authority, no institution now exists with the public support to make an equivalent intervention in our public life. We’ve devoted some five centuries of progressive politics to dismantling all the structures that might be capable of doing so. It’s far from clear what comes next.
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SubscribeA mixture of love and authority … well its not rocket science. But that is why the nuclear family wins – a mother for love and a father for discipline or quite often the other way around. This has been the tried and tested method for years in this country. We stray from this path at our peril.
I agree, and I suspect that is the main reason that BLM wants to abolish the nuclear family.
Absolutely – along with every other aspect of our settled social life. They are in the process of destroying everything we stood for in order to rebuild society in their own image. I’m really looking forward to it … not!
The answer surely then Geoff is to offer love but to ensure we establish our authority to resist such a scenario
It is possible to do both according to circumstances. I raised 3 as a single mum but with fathers who were willing to do a bit. They’re all fine (34-42 ages). Nuclear families are really repressive for many women as financial dependence ensues. 80% of rows about money….
I get your concern about traditional nuclear families perhaps being built upon the construct of misogyny, however ‘times they are a changin’. Hell women play rugby and football these days and more are CEOs in the boardroom, the bedroom and when it comes to the family ‘bank account’!
Hi Alison – I was making a general point. Naturally there are exceptions and there are examples of children doing very well in a single parent household – even in care homes. But on average and all things being equal, the best environment that a child can grow up in is a mum and dad and 4 grandparents. I think there is quite a bit of research on this.
Depends, in our household all our money is ours (except mine which is mine)
You nailed it Geoff!
I think the word is ‘privileged’, not ‘anguished’. And I wouldn’t go back five centuries to Luther, I’d go back about 50 years to all the nonsense of the welfare state, comprehensive education in the UK, the growth of mostly useless and unnecessary university education, and all the associated Frankfurt School nonsense.
Comprehensive and progressive schooling; it all started to go very, very wrong in the 1970’s. This today is what we reap.
There is nothing that can be done about it other than to accept
Yes one statistic tells all – Today the UK has more university lecturers, than there were university students 50 years ago. The idea that half of all jobs need a degree is barking. The quality of some of the teaching is very low. I am not looking at this from an elitist point of view – I never went to university.
I’d recommend “The Great University Con” by Craig and Openshaw as well worth a read on this subject. It is an excellent overview of and judgement upon the expansion of UK HE – comprehensive, but somewhat depressing…
‘The nonsense of the welfare state’ is that a serious point?
Interestingly, most people thought that the children of hippies were going to be the problem. However it has actually tuned out to be the children of the children of hippies who are the real problem. This possibly shows the very high importance in a child’s life of his/her grandparents.
Very few of us actually ever were hippies. While yes of course we pursued individual freedom, anyone with a brain knows that personal freedom only works if it comes with personal responsibility. That was how I raised mine. If things have gone wrong with todays youth, I don’t see how you can pin it on boomers. And I find this child-centred parenting absurd and dangerous. We’re adrift because we’ve abandoned our culture’s traditional religion, rather than seek to reform it as Luther and so many others before and after him did. Human being NEED the cluster of values and rules and awareness of the transcendent that religions provide.
Hosias – Child centred parenting is madness – not just for the child, but the parents too.
On your other point, I’m not religious, but I quite understand where you are coming from. As is quoted often these days, you stop believing in something and you start believing in anything.
There is a wise old saying that ‘if you raised your children, you can spoil your grandchildren, but if you spoiled your children, you will have to raise your grandchildren’
Brilliant. That is exactly as it was for my childhood – pretty strict parents but lovely and generous grandparents. Interestingly my sisters and I knew exactly what was going on from an early age and we didn’t begrudge our parent’s strictness at all.
Mary Harrington – thank you for a very interesting article.
Yes parenting is not easy, especially in an age where the liberal mind drives everything – whether it needs driving or not. Currently I am being told I am a racist, despite being nothing of the kind, with masses of evidence to the contrary. It is a truly odd world.
I think back to my own up-bringing after WW2 (I am slightly too old to be a boomer). There was an occasional tap on the legs, but rarely needed and not brutal in anyway. I would never have done things as I grew up that my parents would have actively disapproved of. It is how I learned the values I live by. I became an adult and was treated as such. My wife had a similar up-bringing. Both of us from working families. While having being part of the new “teenagers” generation, we nurtured our children in a similar way. It boils down to respect I believe, and that is very sadly missing in today’s society. It is surely a balancing act, where you start with lots of love, but
increasingly some defined boundaries as well. Perhaps we were lucky, my wife and
I, but we never found the journey too difficult. 50 years later they
still talk to us!!
Having seen some modern parenting up close, it is often the lack of boundaries that children find hard to cope with (IMHO). They strive on certainty and unconditional love. It is knowing how to loosen the control while remaining supportive. Many university students today are like naughty little children.
I was asked recently, if I would live my life again. I answered yes in a heartbeat. But if I was asked if I would like to live the next 75 years – You have to be joking. Like you Mary I am not optimistic about the direction of travel.
Thanks again
Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who
must be civilized before it is too late.
Thomas Sowell
They should be putting up statues to Thomas Sowell all over America.
Well if they’re even trying to tear down Abraham Lincoln and other well known “Freedom fighters” I sincerely doubt that would help. This “rebellion” is nothing more than a gigantic, unchecked temper tantrum!
He’s a little too right wing/cynical economically for me, though maybe given his status and age he’s right and I’m wrong. I still hope for a social democrat fix, but seems an alien concept to the racial utopian left.
And meanwhile the NHS is busy kicking psychotherapy as a practise (the only psychological therapy that has both containment, benign authority and boundaries at its core) out of its clinics for both adults and children in favour of ‘rational’ therapies which require a sort of unquestioning authoritarian compliance… it’s a very depressing picture indeed.
Parenting has been traduced over recent decades -the reasons for it are complex -but the fact that it is now the norm (and in many cases an economic necessity) to farm your children out to the care of others from early infancy is highly significant and a grave societal mistake.
I don’t know about these ” ‘rational’ theories which require a sort of unquestioning authoritarian compliance” — is this really describe CBT, for example? But if the NHS defunds woo like psychotherapy, you won’t hear me complain.
The dismissal as ‘woo’ of everything that cannot be explicated immediately in sterile language is both a symptom of and one of the driving forces of the accelerating self-devouring of our civilisation.
Well, that seems to have started with Karl Popper, then. You won’t convince me that psychoanalysis has ever cured anyone, nor that it’s a worthwhile use of taxpayer’s money. (I’m happy for people to go privately, just as I’m happy for homeopaths to practice privately.) You’ve dismissed CBT and other modern practices fairly glibly yourself; as I said in my earlier reply I think your presentation of them is false.
Freud; Jung; Fromm; Klein; Freud A; Horney; Joseph; Winnicott; Bowlby; Bion; Rosenfeld; Symington; Grottstein; just some of the most profound and influential thinkers on the subject of the human psyche in all history, whose contributions in thinking and writing, built upon the foundations laid by the greatest philosophers, thinkers, writers, playwrights and artists humanity has known, whose contributions have so greatly advanced the treatment and understanding of a profoundly challenged humanity, brought relief to the afflicted, compassion to their treatment, advancement in theories of mind and emotion.
The grappling and striving continues anon – on foundations so painstakingly laid -but Lo! Suddenly one arrives from behind the fogs of perception; one who possesses even greater intellectual acumen; a clearer voice of truth; more brilliant perception! It soars above such simple, pedestrian meanderings!
Heed the long awaited judgment!
It’s all …”woo”.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And I say, there’s no evidence it works. It’s just argument from authority. I honesty fail to see where any of psychoanalysis is built upon the greatest philosophers. There’s something of Nietzsche in the unconscious, that’s all.
I’ve yet to find a counter-example to Eysenck’s comment on Jung, “Where he is correct, he is not original; where he is original, he is not correct.” And if we’re talking great philosophers and not verbose obscurantists, Karl Popper fairly demolished Freud.
I was taught at university that Freud’s conceptions of the superego/ego/id and conscious/unconscious were muddled, and so they are. As is his conception of child development. About the only thing he got right was abandoning cocaine as a medicinal drug.
You beat me to it! Great ideas without evidence. Like Aristotle…great Philosopher but terrible Scientist.
In the DDR children were in care of others from a young age and they have developed fine. I know many of them personally. So does Sweden. Many tribal people raise children as a village community, they are fine! Even more balanced and empathic people that western. The problem in the west is we are brought economic gain and moving socially up is the only acceptable option.
‘Raphael Simons, even proposed suing his parents for having him without his consent.’
Hamm: Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?
Nagg: I didn’t know.
Hamm: What? What didn’t you know?
Nagg: That it’d be you.
– Samuel Beckett, Endgame
I don’t necessarily disagree with the above; but in the case of my own daughter I think ‘progressive’ brainwashing at school and university was central to the formation of her beliefs, alongside reasonably liberal parenting. As I read recently: how can one oppose social justice? She certainly had boundaries and discipline but those Harry Potter books… and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; was it all too much? Given the current intolerance of the ‘progressive’ cohort, I wonder how much peer pressure plays its part; there seems to be little scope for discussion or debate of issues, such as I enjoyed at school in the 70s, and it is problematic now for anybody to deviate from ‘the script’. There were elements of brainwashing at my school: I went to a trendy comprehensive where almost all the teachers were overtly leftist, but their views were challenged and given my background I was largely content to accept a leftist world view. But I got over it as I got older. I went on many more demonstrations than my daughter does.
Sadly too many younger people reject ‘capitalism’ or the system as it is because it is quite simply failing to deliver for them the benefits it delivered for previous generations. My daughter works hard and is not profligate but earns enough only to get by because of high rents and student debt. Sadly she does not have wealthy parents. Looking at the current wave of BLM+ activity there is an aspect of desperation to it all: I doubt it would have kicked off in the UK if Corbyn had won the last general election, and it also has a lot to do with anti-Trump, even anti-Brexit. The ‘woke’ are so convinced of their rightness; but lose election after election. They simply don’t get the existence of life outside the bubble.
I have endless respect for my daughter’s moral compass and she is a ‘good person’, hard working, responsible etc. I will be very interested to see how her views evolve as she gets older.
I find it interesting that when I was at school (northern comp in the ’70’s) the basic viewpoint of kids was ‘Teachers wrong, parents right’. Nowadays seems to have reversed.
I am now retired and have brought up five children, I have also had a long career in child protection, in my view children need good routine, firm boundaries, structure in their lives and predictable consequences if expectations are not met. They need the freedom, in line with age and understanding, to take risks and build up resilience and at the same time have that protective go to adult if something goes wrong. Throughout time young people have rebelled and held protest, mainly when something profound happens that they see as an injustice, for example, the Vietnam War, abortion rights, birth control rights, etc., often when something happens that makes them afraid, it is part of going from child to adult. At the present there are lots of political concerns, BLM, human made climate change (they believe) etc., in addition the restrictions and fear mongering about the new flu bug, when young people have always needed to be free and gather together. Everything will settle when this is all over.
Anne – nice comment, but I fear things will not settle so easily this time – at least not until a great deal of damage has been done to our society.
If we were left to just get on with it, like Sweden, and the media stopped with these ridiculous headlines, the young people would fare much better!
I hope not Geoff, when you think of all of the other protests they have soon settled down, they just need to be occupied and free again hopefully, keep well and thanks for your response
Postmodernism and its obsession with ‘deconstruction’ when observed in the context of our civil society in the West has been disastrous, it has undermined Liberal values and institutions to such a degree that the concept of boundaries are hard to find and experience for many younger folks. Upper middle class, educated young folks have sadly not known anything else, dependent on their age range. The ensuing void is being filled with authoritarianism, a lack of rationalism and adherence to facts (as there are no facts in the endless interplay of the relativist ideas exchange) we see Nietzhe’s warnings from history being played out. Meanwhile, working class and lower middle class kids do their best to attend to the everyday worries of paying bills and surviving.
Great post, but please note that Luther’s “claim that the faithful don’t need tradition, custom or religious authorities” should rather be attributed to his “sola scriptura” from 1520 when the Pope threatened him with excommunication. The 95 theses mainly deal with the repudiation of indulgences.
I agree with the bones of this article. I have three teens 18,16,14 and believe that a balance of love and discipline ( Gosh! Call Social services quick!) are what children need. Discipline from Greek and Latin i.e. one who learns.
From Google
The word “disciple” comes from the Latin word discipulus meaning “student”. … The word “discipline” is from the Latin word disciplina meaning “instruction and training”. It’s derived from the root word discere — “to learn.
I know it’s a truism but what children and young people need is a good listening to. My wife and I have tried to find balance- listening patiently to the hurt and anger of school and friend dilemmas but there are limits that we will challenge assertively such as rudeness.
We haven’t sorted it. But as the article says – and as a fellow counsellor I concur- often what children and adults need are boundaries: ‘Here and no further and if you do…’. There are consequences.
The problem is that you can make as many Laws and rules as you like: In schools, at home, in society but one has to both have the courage and support to enforce them when necessary.
Poor Luther, condemned by the Right for being a revolutionary who wanted to do away with traditions & condemned by the Left for being a reactionary authoritarian. Now he’s apparently to blame for today’s feckless youth protesters. The truth is Luther greatly valued authority; he merely asked that it be ordered properly. And he was no iconoclast, either; in fact he returned to society from his enforced sojourn in the Wartburg Castle to quell an iconoclastic uprising in Wittenberg. And, Mary, I suggest you actually read the ’95 Theses’ before summarising them.
My children continually wanted to know what the parameters were for new situations. The satisfaction in knowing and understanding the rules was clearly visible on their faces. For example when I took them to a fair ground or a local fete, I used to say something like – you have five pounds to spend, when you run out of money we go home. They would agree with out argument. This generally worked, although every now and then there would be some kind of fine tuning and negotiation. Total freedom generally creates insecure unhappy children, they crave and deserve sensible limitation and boundaries.
I was brought up in a different manner to today.
I was allowed a lot more freedom, within strict boundaries.
For example:
I used to take the bus home from the centre of Birmingham to the suburbs and walk the last 1/2 mile home, from at least the age of seven.
At the age of 12, a friend and I went on a day trip to Crewe – trainspotting!
The other side of the coin was, that if we broke the rules, we expected to be punished and if we had been silly enough that could result in the slipper or cane. I was very rarely silly enough!
He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes. Proverbs 13-24
Absolute twaddle. My children’s generation is no more radical nor angry than mine was 35 years ago.
Totally agree – as a 65year old with kids
Agree! I believe the same, or very similar things were being said about us in the 60s/70s that this article is complaining about in the present..
Spot on. I was thinking about my parenting approach having 3 kids and how they have turned out. Love, boundaries, discipline, reason and hard work seem to have produced nice people. Wish I could stop some of the twaddle they get in school though.
Maybe so, but your generation was less able to destroy the lives and careers of people who disagreed with it.
Please explain. Whose lives and careers are being destroyed by the protestors?
I think the point was that they’re not radical at all: they think their wonderful revolutionary utopia is going to be created by an omnipotent omniscient omni-tolerant nanny state, and their main strategy is appealing to the present authorities to enforce their demands. Cf.. Mary’s “dismantle authority while embracing authoritarianism”
An interesting and thoughtful article. It seems to me that endless, and rather limp, tolerance has succeeded only in producing an ever-exasperated intolerance which becomes more and more manic every time it is accommodated. Discipline, culpability, judgement, religion and restraint have all been abandoned. Everything is ALLOWED. It drives people mad. There are no barriers to kick against. Disrespect intensifies as does the erosion of self-respect. This has been going on for decades and some chickens are coming home to roost. Big ones.
Interesting analysis, but surely it ignores the fact that Luther and Protestantism appeared and developed alongside Capitalism, and are’nt all these probably expressions of instinctive behaviours, ie, the desire to be as free as possible, trade and compete with your neighbours? It’s all tied together. Perhaps our long history of Conservatism vs Liberalism is the best we can manage realistically, under these circumstances.
It’s worth remembering that millions more young people behave themselves and get on with their studies or earning a wage than march about shouting and stamping their feet.
Nevertheless I agree absolutely with Mary’s premise that children and teenagers thrive best with loving kindness allied with firm authority.
I too agree with Mary and also with you Claire. However, our inclinations are not always to do the right thing so freedom has to be backed by teaching right and wrong and by teaching self-discipline.
Interesting article. I would add that we should consider the importance of community in raising a child.
Today’s retirees grew up in smaller, denser communities and children raised in smaller areas develop a stronger sense of community-mindedness, internalizing the values and norms of the group. Smaller communities lack many dangers that cities have, car traffic and gangs aren’t a real problem out there. Consequently, kids can safely play in the streets, parks, or any public spaces that allow them to exist outside of their parents and where they learn to be tougher and more self-reliant.
Our sprawling, ever-expanding, and hugely car-centred metropolitan areas do not represent ideal conditions to raise responsible citizens. Modern urban planning is wired to promote individualistic values and we urgently need to rethink the way we build cities.
High rise flats. Your kids play on a balcony 50 feet up. Blame idiot architects and local politicians
Inner cities are invariably comprised of ‘urban villages’such as the area in London where I grew up. ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ and I am reminded that if ,as kids,we misbehaved in any way outside of the home an adult would not hesitate to ‘tell us off’.Try doing that now ???
The trouble is this article could have been written in 1968 when I was growing – in fact many such articles were written. I have read Patrick Deneen’s book which is over the top to say the least. She makes some valid points but we need a more nuanced analysis.
I’ve worked with the public a fair bit and I think the breakdown of communal norms/rules have left some parents isolated. As a child, I remember neighbours saying things like, ‘Come on, Victoria, your Mum wouldn’t want you doing that’. Very few people would do that now as there aren’t general rules that everyone agrees with and people worry about getting shouted at by insulted mums and dads. It means parents don’t get helpful back-up.
I also notice a lot of parents don’t spend as much time with their kids as they want to, and discipline can go out of the window as their main focus is having enjoyable quality time with their offspring. Crazy housing costs have a lot to answer for, creating a long hours working culture.
Whatever the reason, it can make working with the public quite challenging! Personally, I don’t mind how people raise their kids so long as they’re in charge and consider their impact on the rest of the community. After all, discipline/self discipline is important for integrating into society.
This started with Luther? I don’t think so. I mean, have you actually read any Luther? Seeing him as the Ur moment for all this madness is simplistic to the point of being meaningless. Apart from that, good piece.
May I say Mary I normally love your stuff but I think you’ve been hoist with your own petard in the casual way you dismiss Jonathan Haidt’s arguments in a single sentence. He has decades of peer reviewed, cross cultural academic work in this area on his CV, but you’re not convinced by what he says, based on your personal experience as a psychotherapist and as a parent (I believe Haidt’s a parent too, if that matters).
Who needs authority when we’ve all got our own experience to draw on, eh?
I agree with you – Haidt’s marvellous and, to little old me, most of his “front-brain, rationalist” solutions to child-rearing seem spot on. However to be fair on Mary, I don’t think she meant to dismiss all of Haidt’s arguments on the issue, but was just saying that she thought a more heart-based approach was more effective. But maybe that’s just my bias as, just like you, I love Mary’s work.
Not a fan of Luther, but I wouldn’t lay this at his door. I think the problem is more recent, and specifically about the loss of male authority. Much as I loved The Simpsons (at least in its prime), I was always struck by the fact that every male authority figure – father, priest, head teacher, mayor, police officer, doctor – was portrayed as absurd, corrupt, fat, lazy, hypocritical, incompetent, or combinations thereof. I suspect that programme has influenced the younger generation far more than any sixteenth century renegade monk.
Friar not Monk. Mendicant not Contemplative.
OK, I’ll give you that one
“When I trained and practiced as a psychotherapist….” Couldn’t we have had this in the opening paragraph and saved me 800 words of “dysregulated” verbiage?
If only those in authority hadn’t been so corrupt, greedy and self-serving, we might all have been more inclined to conform to long-established norms and authority structures. However, it become increasingly apparent that many of those at the top of the social hierarchy were discreetly treading down the primrose path of indulgent freedoms leaving those below on the rocky road of repressive righteousness. The MPs expenses scandal was the straw that broke my camel’s back.
The corruption and greed of those in authority – going back some decades now – is indeed a major factor in all of this.
We are ALL corrupt in varying degrees; anyone who doesn’t think so is blind or naive. The difference is in the knowing and the exposure.
Indeed. And it was the general apprehension of people at the top behaving in an exemplary fashion which provided some form of psychological boundary to transgression for the less privileged. Or as Oscar Wilde sardonically quipped ‘what is the use of the lower orders if they are not going to set us a good example.’
All surface behaviour which will always disappoint and embitter when the truth reveals itself as it will. Of course, some don’t look to their social superiors for moral guidance.
You don’t have to be at the top of the social hierarchy to abuse systems, be greedy, etc., etc., many a local tradesman has tricked an unsuspecting customer telling lies, charging too much, etc., etc., Corruption is in all levels of society and class.
We don’t look to local tradespeople for moral example. They are not leaders.
True. Interesting, nevertheless, why we look to our leaders to provide moral example. Education, knowledge, breeding, call it what you will, is not a passport to moral uprightness (though we might wish it were).
My father, who never once in his life raised a hand against me (I was brought up in an age when kids were taught to respect their elders; and did, and still do) used to say about schooling “Spare the rod and spoil the child” How very prophetic.
Just kids throwing the toys out the pram, as opposed to any real progressive ideas about change or making things better.
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso
Ayn Rand fifty years ago-“Three year old whim worshipper become twenty year old thug..a horde of morally unwashed children.”
Hmm. It seems experts are the authorities turned to by the young. And why not? We have been churning out experts far in excess of the number required, ever since using your hands to work became passe. Experts are everywhere: tellling everybody what to think, what to feel and what to do. They have succeeded in replacing parents and traditional parenting methods.
Robert Bly in his book The Sibling Society could see this turning away from looking upwards to there parents or downwards through history and tradition for their wisdom and instead turning sideways to the horizontal plane of their own age group.
Bly gave great weight to the cautionary stories of old (those now banned or rewritten) and predicted the generations coming through would start devouring themselves and the culture around them.
I guess the only institution that hasn’t yet been dismantled is democracy. Whilst this might not on the surface be the response you want, democracy does contain the ingredients of boundaries, authority, responsibility and love.
So the question is can how we use democracy to teach one another how to value one another, how to give worth to one another and how to show one another dignity and respect. Since this is surely the secret of good parenting which always starts by imparting to an infant child the grace to accept a yes and a no.
A child that feels valued, feels worth, feels dignity and feels respect is a child that can give value, worth, dignity and respect. This isn’t achieved by allowing a child to grow up in a rights centred environment free from responsibility but by making the child understand that rights are dependent on responsibilities.
As such, the contempt that underlies safetyism is a product of not learning responsibility which is then angrily projected and transferred on to the absent parent because what is a parent that does not teach their child responsibility towards others but a child themselves.
The whole basis of parenting is to teach a child the responsibility of living and surviving interdependently with others. Within a rights centred upbringing, the child feels no responsibility and so as adults the void of responsibility is filled by the State.
A child should grow up with guidance and explanations about why rights are dependent on responsibility. A child should not grow up thinking that rights are not dependent on responsibility.
Thankfully, through democracy and articles like this, we can fill that desperate void of responsibility by helping adult children to re-parent themselves. Yes this means needing to be burdened with the responsibility that the parents of adult children sought to avoid but we can bring back value, worth, dignity and respect into these people’s lives with the necessary guidance, support and explanations to unlearn their dysfunctional ways with a simple message.
Take responsibility for your lives and take responsibility for your future and demonstrate the required responsibility to show others value, worth, dignity and respect. You can only achieve all these things from deep within yourself.
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Graham Ward has absolutely nailed it. Another dreary set of tropes about children rebelling against parental and other authority as if that has never happened before. The one good thing about the article is that it didn’t contain the word “woke”. I bet someone has used it in the comments though!
I think you’ll be hearing the infamous word “woke” here until the Great Awokening is banished to the dark pages of history. This may be some time, so you better get used to it.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. Socrates (469-399 BC) It was ever thus
I share your pessimism Mary, and look where we’re going because you can see it. I’ll give everyone a preview. Take a good look at the top picture – those two girls could be anyone’s daughters or grand-daughters.
Now look again, but this time, imagine that what that mob is cheering, goading and gesticulating over is someone being lynched…
…because that is where this sort of behaviour ends up.
just a bit of math, chica….boomer generation roughly 1944-1964…..not all that likely that the kids in the streets are the boomer’s kids but nevermind because they are probably the GRANDKIDS of boomers so you can feel free to continue the blame-game whining that most middle class kids have done since forever about their parents (ok, well, since at least the 1950s and the rise of “you’re screwed up because of what your mummy and daddy did’ psychotherapy)…you’re always looking for someone to pin it on…grow up
There was a Canadian law grad on Twitter yesterday saying that tickling is abuse. No context. A couple of others were saying their kid asks them and now they feel weird. Now, either these people are so
untethered from reality they cannot comprehend the significance of what they’re saying, which is a mental disorder that needs attention or they know exactly what they’re doing and there’s sinister motive to this. Either way, it’s a situation I’m not sure can we can reverse. We have to stop engaging on Twitter, trying to debate reasonably thinking it will get through. It won’t.
Some good points there, but a few major omissions:
– Nearly a quarter of quarter of families in the UK are single parent households. Children raised without both parents at home are more likely to engage in crime, drug abuse, etc.
– It’s difficult to find accurate figures for smacking, but it seems it’s at least as prevalent and leads to similar outcomes, as well as lowering IQ.
– These problems seem to be more acute in the black community.
– How many kids are dumped in child care at very young ages and neglected by their parents?
– How many of the antifa types making a mess were indoctrinated by the left at third level instituations?
However bad helicopter parenting is, it seems to me these other issues are more serious.
When you talk about liberal parents and their inability to discipline kids, are you sure you mean liberal and not just plain lazy, thick and often fat?
You see them everywhere. Calling them liberal seems one kindness too many
I am a bit bewildered by the connection the author drew between ultra-liberal parents and radical libertarianism. The author also discussed unschooling, which doesn’t sound terribly far off from libertarian endorsement of homeschooling as a means to avoid being indoctrinated by the powers that be.
Am I to understand that these individuals at opposite ends of the political spectrum share a mutual suspicion of and contempt for authority? I think not. The liberal/leftist rejects cherished institutions, while embracing authoritarianism. The libertarian rejects authoritarianism, and has no particular problem with institutions unless they infringe on personal liberties.
Good diagnosis of the angst currently suffered by the young.
I was chatting about this the other day to a friend and he made a familiar comment, “The problem is that this is a generation that has been taken everywhere as kids by car and never walked…” and I replied that it’s actually worse than that now. This is a generation that are the children of the kids that were driven everywhere so it’s even more embedded now.
All of that fear of stranger danger and the supposed multitude of hazards of the outside world that was increasingly instilled into kids from the 70s onwards has been passed on in an even denser form to their children and now presumably the next generation will be even more terrified of the world. So it’s not surprising that they see monsters everywhere which perhaps explains why everything is fascist or nazi in their eyes…
Thank you for your insight Mary. I’ve been having the exact same discussion with friends. WHAT is the problem? Two really: 1) We have no current “life” treat for the now grown-up child who went crazy in the supermarket UNTIL they got the cookie they wanted…EVERY time. 2) I’m prob too old to honestly help hone the right current cookie batter to matter. ;0) I was raised in a different manner…and time.
What a bloody mess. Likewise, I am deeply pessimistic.
What an unholy rant!
Unholy in the metaphoric or literal sense? If it’s the latter, I think there might be quite a case against your argument in this case.
The real lesson here is that one should never take philosophers as guides to a good life. Philosophy is fun and intellectually challenging, but to claim that many philosophical ideas are rooted in objective reality is a stretch. Antinatalism and all of its roots are wonderful examples of this.
The results of these changes in parenting ideas are obvious because the ideas are fundamentally incredible. These are the absurd extension of the idea that there is no truth and objective reality that we exist only as subjective ideas and feelings.
The idea that children do not benefit from structure is not based upon anything more than a sort of stacking of one subjective idea upon another and then making the magical claim that they as a stack are rational.
Always ask yourself this question when dealing with these young people; do I want to fly on an airplane, work in a skyscraper, drive in a car, that has been designed by this person?
Truth is glorious, it is the only path to knowledge and wisdom, accept no substitute.
Now when the western world finally wakes up to the evils of racism, policy brutality, and hypocrisy, Mary Harrington tells us the ride is too bumpy and for the bumps we should blame permissive parenting. I find her arguments convoluted and hyper-psychological. I wonder has she ever personally met unschoolers or read a book written by John Holt. When one scratches the surface of the world’s brilliant and responsible people, one finds many grew to adulthood outside of, or in rebellion to, mainstream education.
For the placement of blame for the pain and worry caused by what she does aptly describe as “angry activism,” I have simpler, more direct plan. I blame the police who have murdered blacks for decades and who have practice brutality upon those who question them. I blame the “good” police who have failed, also for decades, to control their bad colleagues I blame the police unions, lawyers, and judges who have enabled the systemized protection of the murdering and brutal police. I blame all of us who have remained complacent about racism. I certainly do not blame the protesters or their parents. Protestors are more than justified to be angry. In fact I am grateful that their activism is angry. I’ve been quietly angry for decades. At times, at certain moments, it’s the only thing that works to achieve justice. Surely Mary Harrington understands that It requires anger to challenge entrenched hypocrisy.
Well said Mary. Bringing up children…
As well as love, time, support and security …..
Instill personal responsibility rather than blaming others (or govt) by –
-Say what you mean and mean what you say
-explain consequences, good or bad, of potential actions
– withdraw their privileges if bad behaviour
– be consistent
-set clear boundaries and stick to them
-Follow a routine especially bedtime and family time
-Get them working a little job while still at school
……..With any luck, a child will then be equipped to cope with a grown up world as they reach adulthood – mine did, and pretty successfully!
“Today it is hard to think of a mainstream cultural or institutional arena where it’s not generally accepted that authority and tradition should be questioned”
“It’s far from clear what comes next.”
No, it is very easy and very clear, while democracy eats itself, Islam is moving from 25% to 30% of the world population.
Such an interesting piece. a mix of love and appropriate authority is what many intuitive parents apply. My 28 year old daughter who is a successful media presence in Formula 1 (!) told me I taught her boundaries!
Not more than 100 hundred years ago blacks had their intestines drawn out of their stomachs while they screamed, and people would come from far and wide to watch: doctors, lawyers, judges – bringing their kids having heard of this family picnic event in the papers. Whole communities. And commentators on here talk about BLM as ‘temper tantrums’.
Thank you, Mary Harrington. You have identified “a generation of vipers” and have understood the subversive influence they have had on subsequent generations.
As soon as I stopped blaming my parents for everything I grew up.
This is good commentary for our times. Mary, keep up the good work.
After an active, quasi-lib college youth, this American boomer lost control of his own life, turned to Jesus, married a good woman whom I knew would become a good wife and mother. Our three mature millenniial progeny are effective testimony to the wisdom of a balanced upbringing.
Your article above reminded me of Jordan Peterson’s advice to young people, “Clean your room.”
Mary, I like this perceptive phrase of yours: ” freedom from anything that hasn’t been freely chosen.” That is an attractive idea, but does not necessarily include all the essentials of a life well-lived.
Life must certainly, realistically include making room for at least some things that that have not been “chosen.”
Thanks for sharing.
The rather obvious exclusion here is mention of any sexual needs displayed by a small person. The culture>the state>the parent assumes that “we do not even go there – ever”. How such an official attitude contributes to enriching the unspeakably wondrous potentials of ‘the child’ quite escapes me. Such needs do exist, however ‘randomly occurrent’. (There’s probably a neat confusion of ‘enrichment’ with “exploitation” at work. Certainly not at play). I’d hope that a writer of Mary H’s demonstrated calibre would be plucky enough to broach this topic without automatically denuding the entire bird…
I’m not quite sure why you brought the sexual needs of children up here, however it’s certainly a good point. And what amazes me is that this taboo of discussing it exists while our public health and education systems are gaily encouraging underage children (who aren’t even legally allowed to have sex yet) to take hormones and chop rather useful bits of themselves off to “change” their sex at the slightest whim.
What!!!
Agreed that there are problems with a knee-jerk anti-authority stance likely nurtured in part by mostly liberal parents who prefer to teach the questioning of authorities rather than unconditional obedience to them. But the author here (M. Harrington) is a little evasive about where she stands; and one could easily get the impression that she’d prefer young people who obeyed authority w/o question to those who get perhaps over-zealous in the face of the systemic injustice problems that were identified in the latter half of the 20th century but not adequately addressed in either the US or the UK. Moreover, Harrington loses my confidence in her as an intelligent critic in the penultimate paragraph where she refers to “Debates about ‘systemic’ oppression that none of us can fix”. What is the meaning of the scare-quotes around “systemic”? Does the author doubt, for instance, that there is systemic racial oppression in the US? Fine if you want to doubt that, but then we all know that you have your head in the sand and your plea for a renewal of authority-obeying children is nothing but a preference for maintaining the power arrangements of that status quo. By all means, encourage citizens of supposedly democratic countries to click their heels and obey despite whatever injustices are rotting our societies and undermining the moral positions of governments! On the other hand, you might just want to read Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism to be reminded of the costs of authoritarian societies.
This is a Straw man argument.
Because Ms Harrington is questioning the crazy liberalism so apparent in ” right on ” modern parents, she is suddenly in favour of jackboots….. ???
This is absolutely not what she is driving at.
She is saying that kids need their parents to give them guidance, after all they were young once….and they’ve had a lot more experience..
Now, at a moment when the western world finally wakes up to the evils of racism, police brutality, and hypocrisy within liberalism, Mary Harrington tells us the ride is too bumpy, and for the bumps, she says, we should blame permissive parenting. I find her arguments convoluted and hyper-psychological. I wonder has she ever personally met unschoolers or read a book written by John Holt. When the scratch the surface of the world’s brilliant and responsible people and you find many grew to adulthood outside of, or in rebellion to, mainstream education. For starters, just consider Einstein and Churchill.
For the placement of blame for the pain and worry caused by what she does aptly describe as “angry activism,” I have a simpler, more direct plan. I blame the police who have murdered blacks for decades and who practice brutality. I blame the “good” police who have failed, also for decades, to control their bad colleagues. I blame the police unions, lawyers, and judges who have enabled the systemized protection of unethical policing. I blame all of us who have remained complacent about racism. I certainly do not blame the protesters or their parents. Protestors are justified to be angry. In fact I am grateful that their activism is angry. Anger, per se, is not violence. Anger can be, needs to be channeled, and at times, at certain moments, it’s the only thing that works to achieve justice. It’s what is required to challenge entrenched hypocrisy.
Rubbish, your response is a knee-jerk reaction.
Studies by the University of Michigan and Maryland show that Black people are no more likely to be shot by the police than White people.
Try thinking for yourself instead of following the mob…….its one reason people come to this site.
I guess we COULD just throw studies at one another. ( “Victims were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites.–Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcement, Findings From the National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 U.S. States, 2009″“2012 by DeGue, Flowler, Calkins, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, November 2016) But instead, let me say that I’ve lived in the US most of my life, covered policing for a daily newspaper (albeit briefly), and known and respected American policemen throughout my life. (I’m 69 years old) My personal experience tells me there is no contest: people of color are disproportionately abused by the police and rarely protected by the system.
Yes, to read free thinking is indeed why I come to this site, but sometimes even Unherd writers and commenters slip lazily into their own little mobs, and then I feel obliged to push back with some commonsense.
Beyond current-day social-science studies and our personal experiences that I previously mentioned, there are two other arenas in which to think about this. (1) Scholarly works in American history discussing slavery and lynching, and the eras of failed Reconstruction, Jim Crow and civil-rights movement –these undeniably document the long tradition of subjugation and exploitation and establish a horrid legacy from which one would expect racism and police abuse to continue into our day. (2) A body of exquisite literature from Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglas to Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Ta-Nehisi Coates paint a convincing portrait of this horrid legacy. Do their writings not move you at least somewhat to expect that racism and brutality would continue into our day?
If you’ve ever been on the wrong side of the police you’ll know that violence is what the police do – that’s the deal. I’ve been in a George Floyd situation for doing much less than him (and without his police record) and I’m as white as the driven snow (couldn’t resist some poetry). To be fair it was not anywhere near 9 mins, but it did include 6 officers on top of me with my face in the ground. The more you protest or plead the more they push. The stats to remember are these: in the US the ratio for deaths per POLICE STOPS is higher for whites than for blacks. A fact I learnt recently and I was probably as shocked as you to learn it. The mass media will never give you those stats. [NB: – I thought what that officer did to Floyd was absolutely appalling and of course it should go to trial with the full force of the law]
Bravo!
Rather than raging at the system (your parents), why don’t you put your contempt to one side and actually engage with the paradoxes which makes change so difficult.
https://www.rechargenews.co…
Add to these the fossil fuel paradox whereby 200 years of layered development has been built, from the bottom up, on the use of carbon fuels. Even today, 80% of the world economy is powered by carbon fuels including smelting which currently has no non-carbon alternative.
Also we have the human population paradox whereby every extra human needs at least 4 acres of utility land to survive and prosper.
Then we have the economic growth paradox whereby expanded economic capacity reduces ecological capacity.
Raging at authority figures does not help to resolve these human civilisation threatening paradoxes one iota. In fact it is an abdication of responsibility.