The kids aren’t alright

This article should be laminated and stapled to every school noticeboard across the land

Absolutely on the nail. The notion that parents should be their child’s friend, rather than parent, is another aspect of this. Children need parents, and the boundaries they set. They’ll fight the boundaries, of course – that’s the point, to test oneself against boundaries, rather than flail around having no idea what’s what. Without parents parenting, kids have no idea how to make decisions they will still be glad they made ten years later. Thanks for the sanity, Hadley.

The Left has no idea how much damage their brand has taken by hitching themselves to the trans agenda. I don’t think I’m alone as a parent in thinking that if I ever found anybody pushing trans ideology on my daughter (especially after reading Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier) that I would have zero compunction about moving to an entirely different city, state, or country overnight to get her as far away from it as possible. If I’m willing to uproot my entire livelihood over this issue, maybe it’s better not to also tempt my sensibilities with relentless, gaslighting ad campaigns and corporate homages. Boycotting is THIS easy. I don’t NEED any of their s***.

“Those that can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”
This is terrifying. We are training a generation of Red guards.

I think the author has hit the nail on the head. Trans and the 32 genders are the youth culture of today. There is no better way of sticking it to your old man than to say you are two-spirit genderqueer. It’s the same way that kids in the 80s got a nose piercing and said they were punk. Trouble is, today’s nonconformist youth want the government and HR departments to validate their identities, through taxpayer funding of various NGOs, legal protection for the same 32 genders, hate-speech laws, and so on. Back in the day, punks would have been embarrassed to have state recognition of their chosen identity. It would have been a total buzzkill. How times change.

It’s bullying, simple as that. And the way you deal with bullies is to stand up to them – if they hit you, hit them back. They’ll think twice before doing it again. Everyone who has survived playground bullying, or has been a playground bully themselves (and many fall into both categories), knows that bullies go after weak targets, kids who can’t or won’t fight back.

Bullies bully others because they themselves feel vulnerable and scared. The same dynamic played out with people bullying others into face masks and vaccine passports. It’s the same basic fear and vulnerability (of loss of domestic power) that drives the Chinese Communist Party into bullying people across the world into spouting its lies and ideology, and tacitly supporting the brutal repression of ethnic minorities within the territory it controls. The same dynamic that leads political leaders in liberal democracies to allow themselves to be bullied into taking the knee, talking palpable nonsense about gender identity, and into signing up to tyrannical global health treaties that will facilitate more bullying. It’s the same thing that drives the leaders of Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and other monopolist bullies to bully out competitors: scared little unhappy children throwing their weight around.

One of the best ways to deal with bullies is to mock them, laugh at them, but otherwise ignore them, until the point they actually attack you and you have to fight back. And here’s where my analogies break down: the likes of Gates, Xi et al were all once victims of bullying, but their material power means that they now deserve nothing but our contempt and mockery. Ditto with establishment bullying organisations like Stonewall. Whereas a confused teenage girl who thinks she’s a boy needs the compassion and support of responsible adult role models who have the moral courage and backbone to tell her that she is loved, that she is valued, that she can and should express herself as she feels but that employing novel medical interventions that will mess with her body’s biology is not a step to be taken lightly – and that her fear and confusion don’t entitle her to bully others into adopting her childish worldview or perception of who she is.

Great article. I’m sure the writer must feel isolated on the staff of The Guardian. I was anorexic at 13, became effeminate in an all boy school as a sign of my misery, and was horribly bullied. I didn’t need gender reassignment. I needed protection from bullies and a gentler ethos at school. Within a year I dropped the effeminacy and learned to accept the male part of my identity. I didn’t need it surgically or chemically removed

An excellent, but somewhat unnerving article for someone who is hoping to have children within the next few years. I was born in the early 90’s and even as early as starting secondary school in the early to mid 00’s, I could swear that people began to raise their children in this manner. Instead of getting the child to behave when out shopping, parents would give them whatever they wanted to keep them quiet. This was also around the time “participation trophies” and such seemed to become more common. Even at such a young age, it didn’t seem like a particularly good idea.

Even so, it’s not really fair to blame the Zoomers and youngest of the Millennials for this. It was an abject failure of the parenting of those born in the late 60’s and 70’s to instil this discipline that is badly required to face the world. Now we see Zoomers being so scared to fail and question things, they often won’t try or think of anything outside their comfort zone which is one reason (among many) why their mental health is all over the place. For us Millennials, we need to teach our children that failing isn’t a disaster, it’s how you respond to it and to ask difficult and uncomfortable while also being asked them. If not, we’ll all lose.

Puberty blockers are reversible the same way induced comas are reversible when the comatose patient has to ask to be wakened. I can think of few things more evil than injecting a 10 year old with Lupron, waiting 6 years & then declaring the de facto 10 year old capable of adult consent.

‘In the appallingly sexist but undeniably revealing documentary, What is a Woman?’
What’s appallingly sexist about it? Just stated as a fact. Because he’s an openly conservative writer? How did that sexism manifest?

I moved my child to a different school when I complained her work was going uncorrected, and was told that the other children ‘peer-reviewed’ each other’s work. Unfortunately, most six year olds are not great at spelling or maths. I suggested a qualified adult overview would help and the teacher gaped at me and said earnestly “It’s excellent for team-building skills and that’s what employers want to see!”. At a new school, she made rapid progress on spellings, tables etc. Adult insight, supervision and expertise is always needed for good results, it needn’t stifle nature creativity or energy but…it is needed! And the same now applies to public life, workplaces, government…you name it, we need some adults in the room. Bravo Hadley.

Of course the young are immature and want to do stupid and risky things from time to time. It is the task of their elders to try to stop them or at least issue clear warnings regarding the risks. Unfortunately, the fact that in the past the young have been stopped doing things that were not in fact harmful or particularly risky or are no longer so harmful has undermined the self-confidence of adults. A lot or moral rules had practical purposes which have become less pressing with, for example, the availability of contraception.
Unfortunately, so much emphasis has been placed on “rights” that sensible advice to women that might help them avoid being sexually assaulted is often regarded as victim blaming and resented as an attack on their “rights”.
However much some child might have a right to make a foolish choice it remains the duty of parents and other adults to do their level best to advise, warn and prevent them from taking decisions with potential long-term adverse effects.
The threat of suicide is merely the extension to the threat to “scream and scream until I am sick” and should not be endorsed by professionals.

I really put the blame of the current state not on the young but on the middle-aged and older. They raised these kids to be self important and not challenge them and the people heading the institutions such especially universities and media have not held the ground against the radical youth but fed their delusions. All this woke nonsense could have easily been nipped in the bud before it did any damage.

I watched “What is a Woman?” and didn’t find anything remotely “sexist” about it, let alone “appallingly” so. This author admits the documentary is “undeniably revealing”, but feels the need to make a false claim about it in the same paragraph. Ideology-led, perhaps?

Good essay confirming that we are dealing with grown ups who never grew up.

“ In the appallingly sexist but undeniably revealing documentary, What is a Woman?, alt-right provocateur Matt Walsh…”

Really???

As a public school High School teacher I watched this live and in person. During my Master’s degree program in 2010 we read yet another book on child development. All of us teaching K-12, me- 11-12 Physics & Chem, saw our students ALL not matching the descriptions of developments for their age. I am reading about elementary ages and seeing the faces of my 16-18 year olds reflected in the descriptions. All the teachers said the same thing.

Once we rec’d an email from a principal- read this! Research shows what students want from their teachers! 20 things were listed. 3 items in I understood OMG they want ‘PARENTS’.

I left off teaching HS because the kids run the show and the stress was killing me.

I went on to teach College and they are infants, too. And all the ‘adults’ are being Baby-Led.

Retired now but recalling all the teaching experiences still raises my blood pressure.

Some of this parenting approach may come from the popular belief that children are born perfect, and that they already know everything. This idea is surprisingly prevalent in education circles despite seeming like a religious belief.
We have friends who have raised their daughter this way – they refused to teach her anything, saying she already knew everything. So they taught her nothing, including language. It has been an interesting experiment to observe. 
At one years old she was great, a cute, fat healthy baby.
By two she was very bright, keen, engaging, highly social, desperate to learn, and a truly magnetic child .
By the age of three it seemed her polarity had been reversed. She was repellent. Disengaged, disinterested, conceited and rather vile. 
It was amazing to see that little of this approach had had really impressive results (my wife is an early years teacher and was very impressed with her development at two.) But that a little more had produced one of the least likeable children either of us had ever dealt with. More interesting still was the total denial of her parents who had committed so strongly to this notion that their daughter already knew all there was to know, that they could not or would not acknowledge the experiment seemed to have run its course. 

“It would be her choice if she wanted to self-harm, but I wouldn’t buy her the razor.” Perfectly expressed. By convincing a confused child that their transient and incomplete understanding of themselves represents a permanent state, parents are unwittingly doing great harm. The risk assessment part of the pre-frontal cortex does not complete development until the mid twenties, so what makes anyone think that a fourteen year old is ready to make irreversible changes to her body?

Good article. Kids need boundaries – to respect those of others as well as to uphold their own – to be positive adults in a relational world. Baby-led went far too far. Also, baby-led has been appropriated by extreme genderism to hide the adultification it is actually doing, lifting children out of their right to be safeguarded from predatory ideologies.

I loved the spirit of this article but I am not at all sure we are dealing with a situation in which youth is leading age. In fact I think we are in a society where age is sitting in hideously elephantine fashion on youth. Has there ever been, in human history, a society with the demographics of the contemporary West? Tons of old people, fewer babies born every year?
Boomer youth culture was created by a huge demographic boom of youth.
Today’s youth culture seems to me to be foisted on young people by old activists, trans activism being the most distressing example. Trans activism is mostly funded by autogynephilic men — men who transition in middle age to satisfy a fetish. They spin a narrative about themselves (“I’ve *always* been a woman”) that requires young trans-identified people be conjured up as supporting evidence.
Generally speaking, trans-identified young people are very unhappy. They are correct when they identify the source of their unhappiness as social mores and values being imposed upon them. They are incorrect when they see “TERFs” as the source of those unhappy making values. TERFs have no funding, TERFs have not created the culture in which they are living and suffering.

I’m glad that someone, at last, has written this article. I fear that many parents don’t understand what the word ‘responsibility’ really means and to have consistent boundaries. Our society, particularly through our media, infantilises everyone

Hadley writes so well, and makes perfect sense on this contentious issue. One small point: the Cass Review published only its emerging finding in March this year; the full report is still to come. The Review is indeed independent, but was commissioned by NHS England and so is officially approved and authoritative.

In what way was the documentary film What is a Woman “appallingly sexist”? Having watched it and enjoyed it I am genuinely bewildered by this assessment. I suspect Hadley is so ashamed to have seen and agreed with the film she feels obliged to disparage it in this way on the grounds that a film made by someone on the right just has to be sexist surely?

I hope Hadley Freeman has made the leap from the Guardian..she is too good a writer to stay with
the ‘professional whingers’.
Excellent article!

Does anyone remember Enid Blyton’s Famous Five character George? She was a girl, Georgina, who dressed as a boy. She influenced me so much that I began wearing my brother’s clothing. It was fun for a while and it relieved my boredom – until I started sprouting breasts! And so, I gave up the pretence, embraced being a gutsy girl and moved onto other interests.

It’s our job as parents to protect our kids from ideology that is designed to destroy them and the family unit. I also tend to find it extraordinary how little kids get their own smartphones with no parental filters and some as young as 9 having access to SnapChat — that is opening the doors to the content that seeks to normalise neopragmatic, destructive identity politics explicitly designed to destabalise society. The fact that these applied postmodern activists think that 2+2=4 is racist and oppressive shows the kinds of personality disorders that have been let loose. Heaven and God help us all!

The attitude of the adults to capitulate in front of the younger generation’s ideas is not new and has presented itself again and again. Based on the concept that young is beautiful and old is, well, old, ie obsolete.
In such cases a look at the good, old Bible is very useful. In the original language of the Bible, hebrew, youngsters are defined by the term NOAR which comes form the verb LENAER ( to agitate ). The idea is that the young is restless and endlessly “agitated”. Hence the need of the older generation to come in and let the things cool down, then matters can be considered calmly.

This article hits the spot: children are not at all ‘all right’ and allowing them to control their own lives and, tangentially, the lives of many of us, is societal madness reducing many of us to whimpering idiots. Oldies like me find it bizarre and a reflection of the West’s decline (Where’s that copy of Gibbon?) or it’s so madly and obviously wrong as to make us unable to even remotely emote with those concerned. My mother would have said ‘for Heaven’s sake pull yourself together and grow up’ but I suppose these days that would not do at all.
We all know that the political world continually changes and we are alive only at some stage in that larger process. It is bad luck for those of us who concur with the tenor of this article that it happens to be now. We do not have to give in to current wokedom though and we absolutely must not. Speak out, laugh at its insanity, mock its adherents … but don’t succumb.

A very timely and welcome article. Parents are getting out-manoeuvered by their teens at every hands turn. Just tell the little darlings that you love them enough to say “No”. Sure they’ll rant and rave against it, but stay firm, and once you have said “No” don’t wobble.

I don’t know if I’m right, but, like Kate, I was a very unhappy adolescent girl who was treated for anorexia. So I know a little about unhappy and confused adolescent girls, and how much we attack our own bodies to express that unhappiness. I also know what it’s like to be a desperate parent who just wants their kid to stop crying, to be happy and healthy and safe, and to feel like I’m a good parent who listens. The baby-led approach is an expression of that because sometimes (often) we don’t know what’s best for our kids, especially when it comes to a new issue like gender. But guess what? Your kid doesn’t know either, and nor, it seems, does anyone else who is supposed to safeguard them. Our kids aren’t breaking down barriers, they’re rock climbing without any safety ropes, and we’re encouraging it. It’s time for my generation to grow up, and be the adults.

Great article, thanks.

“always under 15, invariably female”

You missed ‘always reads Manga, not interested in make up or sport, probably a bit mousy, would have absolutely been an Emo ten years ago.’

Trust me.

It’s almost as if it isn’t about trans issues at all and is more connected with a crisis in female subjectivity and body image at the point of puberty…

Because, the thing is, I have not met a trans-boy yet who has the faintest idea about what being an actual boy is actually like, if pushed they wouldn’t have a clue about the teenage male subjectivity that they seek to appropriate like a faded Nirvana t-shirt and a Jack Skellington backpack: the reality is that they usually avoid actual boys and have a coterie of natal female friends, often deciding they are [insert identity here] as a group to maximise attention.

Just to add to my earlier comment, the report of the pupil being surrounded by up to sixty of her classmates, and my comparing it to being worse than anything in Dr Zhivago, the movie, well, let me rephrase that: it wouldn’t have looked out of place in Dr Zhivago. There are some very grim scenes in Dr Zhivago.

What else should we expect from people who practically shut down our whole civilization for a year over a virus with a fatality rate of less than 1%. That’s not a rational mature reaction, it’s more like a child hiding under the bed to hide from monsters in the closet. There aren’t enough real adults left to keep all these kids in check.

The country’s gone from the lax Space 1999 era, glorious TV theme tunes and the old farts that came up with them to Safe-space 2022, complementary tantrums and threats, and kids listening to Harry Bush and Kate Styles, whoever they are.

The youngster who was surrounded by three score of individual fellow pupils, recently, and spat at, sounds horrific: worse than any scene in Dr Zhivago, I would say (except for the officer of the Tzar’s army who is pulled violently from his horse by his men and disappears under a whole bunch of them). Where was the young lady’s safe space?

What the UK lacks is a simmering volcano that keeps everybody wise. In some countries of the world, there exist active volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes. Mother Nature makes the people living there grounded. What would they think of the topics covered in this piece? What would they think of Britain and America today? Would they say that the very young in the West are being pushed around too much, pushed from pillar to post, and don’t live the carefree lives of, say, their grandparents? Childhood is very fleeting.
Somehow when a tornado blows through an area of the American mid-West, it blows away the nonsense of the infatuation with the new ideologies. For a short time.

(From Mrs Horsman)

“It would be her choice if she wanted to self-harm. But I wouldn’t buy her the razor,”

This is the first time I’ve understood this issue through the lens of self harm. I remember puberty vividly. I was traumatised by it. My breasts suddenly sprouted giving me stretch marks, I gained weight, I got spots on my face, dark hair grew under my arms, I began to stink, and I had cramps in my abdomen every month and bled like a wounded animal. It was horrific. I wanted to die. Many teenage girls go through the experience of wanting to STOP being a woman, they don’t want to be a man, they just don’t want to grow up. Much as they might clamour for more independence, the reality is – even that is just testing their boundaries. Leaving childhood is traumatic, but we all have to do it. Teenagers need help and support as they transition into ADULTHOOD, not enabling to block their own physical development. I’m so pleased that there is such a strong pushback against the pernicious trans agenda. It will fail because it is inhumane and self-destructive (none of these kids who’ve been given hormone treatment will be able to procreate) but so many children’s lives will be destroyed before it’s over.

It started with the 1960s counter-culture telling everyone to “question authority,” a trend that has had tremendous sway over the generations since. But instead of evaluating authority where they find it and asking whether it is legitimate, the generations since have interpreted this maxim to mean, “Negate and disrespect authority wherever you see it as authority itself is an invalid concept.” The values system where someone who has spent an entire career or lifetime learning and perfecting their skills in a field of human endeavor until they became a virtuoso has been thrown out the window. A painter, a musician, a dancer, a scientist, a teacher, a writer, an architect who has honed his or her skill for decades is now considered to be on par with someone who just took up that pursuit. There are articles all the time about dismantling the “elitist” system where we only value those at the top. “All art is beautiful.” “Anyone can be an artist/writer/sculptor/creator.” “Art by prisoners/kindergartners/unemployed bus drivers, while naive, is just as beautiful to some people as the works of famous artists!” they announce gleefully.
Why should someone who has been training as a pianist since the age of three get to be the only performing at Carnegie Hall? Parents teach their children to “question authority” before they can ride a bicycle. Why should a professor who has studied a subject for 30 years be considered an “expert” on a subject when anyone’s opinion is just as valid? Of course sports are a huge exception to this. We choose our top athletes by their skills and experience in their chosen sport and we only allow the best (elitism!) to perform on the best college and professional teams. We do not choose our sports teams by lottery so that “everyone gets an equal chance to participate.”
And an unfortunate analog to this attitude is the one where parents feel no right to have any “authority” over their children. They are not “raising” the children, but rather keeping them fed and safe while their inner self emerges with no influence from them. Who is the parent to tell the child when to go to bed or whether to finish their supper? No one! The child will naturally go to sleep when it feels tired and eat when it’s hungry. Why should they have to finish their homework when it doesn’t interest them as much as Fortnite? If the teacher wants the child’s attention, s/he should strive harder to make math and English as fun as a game.Forcing a child to use the toilet before it’s ready will give it neuroses for life! So what if it’s still in diapers in Kindergarten? So what if a 7-year-old is still nursing from his mother’s breast? He’ll stop when he’s ready. And other children better not dare make fun of him for it or they’ll have to have a special “circle time” about how differences need to be celebrated, not criticized.
People take their five year old to go house shopping and ask their opinion about which house to buy because after all, “She’s just as much a member of the household as anyone and why shouldn’t she have a say in where she’s going to live?”
There was a great book about this called “The Omnipotent Child” by a psychiatrist with many years’ experience with troubled children. He talks about the huge psychological burden that children feel when we include them in decisions that they are far too young to be able to handle. It happens when a divorced parent uses their young child as a sounding board for his/her feelings about the divorce or new people they are dating. It happens when parents ask the child’s input on grownup decisions that the child is not capable of evaluating. And it causes great anxiety in children to be made responsible for things that are beyond them. Having decisions made for them can be an extraordinary relief to an overwhelmed child, even when they argue about it.

really great points here, and yeah self-harm is a choice but you wouldn’t give your daughter a razor

This is one of the best articles I have read on any topic. Every adult should be required to read it.

You have to wonder if the parents who are embracing baby led are the children who were raised by helicopter parents. We seem to swing from one extreme ideology to the opposite extreme ideology. I’m all for children learning independence and responsibility but if they aren’t being parented at all then they wont learn responsibility because they can blame a distinct lack of parenting.

Maybe if we let babies suckle and sleep freely we would not have as many self-harming teens. The author makes the error of equating babies’ pure instinct – which is from Mother Nature – with teens’ de-natured tribal fixations. Few parents living under anti-family, GDP/greed-driven policy in nuclear family societies are able or willing to fully embrace the adult/parental role of satisfying children’s attachment needs. That would be inconvenient and unappreciated for parents and, more importantly, lower corporate profits. Few children have adults who meet their attachment needs, thus they attach to their peers and peer culture’s social media ‘friends’ and gurus instead of attaching to their caring adults. The parents of today are yesterday’s peer-attached children. Our attachments dictate our preferences and beliefs. Parents unwittingly facilitate attachments that are hostile to them by putting children in group care for too many hours long before they are developmentally ready and by providing digital babysitters and phones. Thus there are a lot of profoundly attachment-needy children of all ages all around us.

It’s time we all just started saying no again. Because there are far more sensible people who find the time we are in insane but we’ve all gotten too afraid to say, No. if we all just pony up and put our foot down, the tides will turn. No more jury by social media. No more life ruining ostracism for viewpoints. Due process matters and allowing activists to litigate our society is a grave error. No, you can’t be a boy if you are a girl. You will be a trans individual and that comes with a lifetime of challenges and pain. Testosterone won’t fix it. Think long and hard about the road ahead. What we are doing to a generation is criminal.

My wife and I adopted a few parental strategies early on that have served as well as our 3 girls have entered their teen years:
If you wouldn’t want your 15 year old wearing it, don’t dress your 7 year old in it.
The behavior you tolerate at 4 will still be going on at 14. So choose what to tolerate well.
Raising a teenager is like warfare. Choose your battles carefully, but make sure you win the ones you choose.
Children don’t need a large number of similar age peers; they need a small number of adult mentors.

I’m sure others here can add to this list, and as my kids are 13, 15, and 15, I would love to hear others suggestions. We still have a ways to go, so I need all the help I can get. 🙂

I do want to push back on one thing in this article: ‘younger generations have always looked for ways to differentiate themselves from the stuffy old farts who came before”. This is actually a very WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich, & Democratic) perspective. Most of the world today and most humans that have ever lived would disagree that teenage rebellion is normal and healthy. Most would find the broad toleration of it antithetical to a functional society.
Jus thinking out loud… I’m pretty sure our encouragement of teenage independence from elders is partially responsible for the gradual disintegration of social bonds in the West in the latter 20th century. But I wonder if it isn’t also partially responsible for the economic dynamism that characterized the previous century. Maybe these are 2 sides of the same coin: greater generational independence breeds entrepreneurial drive and opportunity but also cultural upheaval and dysfunction, potentially undermining its own society. Like most things in life, there is no utopia — no perfect level of parental involvement in this case — but rather just competing tradeoffs.

“As it happened, my three-year-old had, that same morning, informed me he was an astronaut, but it hadn’t occurred to me to tell anyone (or NASA)”
HA!
Thank you, good stuff

At my all-boys minor public school in the 70s Sex Education was cringingly ‘delivered’ as part of the biology syllabus. As a pre-pubescent teenage boy I remember being bewildered by what I had learned. I could not, for the life of me, understand the need for contraception. I imagined that after 5 years of marriage Norma would turn to Norman and say: “My dear, I think it’s time we had a baby. Tonight we’ll do that disgusting business we learned about in biology, but it’ll be worth it when we have our beautiful baby. Why on earth was there a need to allow people to do that disgusting business without pregnancy resulting?
About a year later puberty hit me like a cricket bat and I suddenly understood why contraception was such a good thing.
The thought of kids making irreversible decisions about their bodies before experiencing sexual drives and desires is, frankly, terrifying.

It seems that every new generation of earnest clear-eyed young people must tear down some new injustice and rebel against the tenets of the previous generation. We have had women’s liberation, gay liberation and now the triumph of self-perception and liberation from factual reality. I worry that the next generation will have no new targets to attack. Where do we go from here?

Hadley,
the comments here seem to be rather positive, but even if I have to be in a minority I have to stress that you either you misunderstood the concept of “baby led” as applied to infants or you simply misapplied it make a point in your article.
“Baby led” means exactly that, the baby when growing will go through certain milestones according to his or her pace, not the parents’. You yourself said that your twins didn’t like the “schedule”, and that is a fine example. However you then carry on saying that “baby led” means “free for all”, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. You seem to be equating that to what we see in films (or should I say comedies) when you see the “progressive” parent with the child that does what he likes when he likes it, with no restraints of any kind. That is not “baby led”, but at most “spoilt led”.
“Baby led” if you like is more like “pick your own battles”. For example, does your toddler (I am thinking of slightly older kids for simplicity) want to wear his shirt back to front? Suit yourself, I say. He doesn’t want to eat breakfast? Fine by me, just remember that there won’t be another meal till lunch. And so on. He doesn’t want to wear a seat belt in the car? Alas, that must be worn, and we all know that is non negotiable.
As you see, I am not spoiling the child, I am just making everyone’s life easier.
When the children are still infants, baby led means that you take the cues from what the child tells you, rather than deciding unilaterally that he shall eat x grams of this and that, sleep for Y hrs in 30 mins’ time and so on. Such approach, which I have tried with both my kids does make your life SO MUCH easier, and my kids are not spoilt. There are always boundaries. For example, my kids have always been able to choose what to eat from what there is on the table, but they may not open the fridge and get something else or get something different cooked on order.
I think you are conflating two completely different things and in so doing you are not doing a good service to new parents who might read this (to me rather) dis-informative article.
If you wanted to make a more apt comparison you could have spoken of the “child led” schooling in Scotland – thanks Curriculum for Excellence! I suggest you look that up.
In any case, baby led does NOT lead to having a spoilt child.

Spot on. Just brilliant . I wore my gender non conformity with pride as a WOMEN. I shaved my head, wore big boots and femmed myself with red lippy. God loves a punk. I did what I wanted, when I wanted and truly knew I was breaking fresh ground. I took my eye of the prize to have babies in my late thirties and nearly twenty years later, I’ve stuck my head above the parapet to realise things have slid backwards.
I understand the pain, I was a teen riddled with bulimia and body dysmorphia, but being different gave me the escape I needed. Being a rebellious WOMAN gave me the escape that I needed.
As a side, Ive done the spooning and the baby led weaning, baby led defo has ease and more photo ops.

Nailed it.
Every educator, at every level and every school governer currently paralysed by antics of the vile trans lobby and their ilk, should be made to read this. Parents often know their children better than anybody and their opinions and roles need to be recognised and most importantly, respected.
The ideolgues currently launching a wrecking ball through societies and families need taking away at the knees..

Julia Boyd’s “Travellers in the Third Reich” articulated very well the observation that it was the Hitler Youth that made the Nazi regime tick – that swelling ideological hatred that indoctrinated young people. Just as it was the Red Guard of the Communists in China that oiled the Cultural Revolution.

A timely article. We’re getting an overdose of “teen ideology” in New Zealand under Jacinda Muddleduck (with apologies to Beatrix Potter’s estate). Here’s NZ’s Children’s Commissioner stressing the importance of “hearing children’s voices on policies affecting them”. The article’s a bit old now, but if anything it’s got worse since then.

“A lot of good has come from this: today’s teenagers are far more clued up than we were in the Nineties, when jokes about disabled, fat, BAME and gay people were pretty much par for the course in any stand-up show and school playground.”
Are you sure these things aren’t somehow connected? As the great Thomas Sowell says, “there are no solutions, only trade offs.” When you start to police peoples’ speech, and no matter how “good” your motives are, you start a chain of actions and reactions and it is difficult (or is it?) to see where it all ends. Perhaps telling fat jokes had some positive effects? Or am I not allowed to make that case any longer? We seem always so eager to try any “solution” – and considerations of costs and consequences (intended or otherwise) are such a buzz kill…
Overall, great article and I believe spot on with respect to the analysis of the upside-down nature of current generational relations.

The thought of all the teenage girls that are being brainwashed into thinking they are really boys in the wrong body fills me with horror! I was a tomboy, got on better with boys than girls, had few so-called feminine interests – would I too have been under pressure to declare myself transgender? The vast majority of these girls are, like I was (and to a degree still am), tomboys, lesbians or suffering from conditions such as autism. This rampant rush to prescribing life altering drugs, and even surgery, is both a form of child abuse and extremely misogynistic. Fancy girls instead of boys? Oh no you are not a lesbian, you are a boy trapped in a girl’s body – the explosion in the number of teenage girls identifying as trans is seriously concerning! The 21st century parent needs to stop trying to be their child’s friend and start acting like a parent – ie doing what is best for your child, which is not always doing what they think they want that particular month of the year. I sincerely hope that, as with all teenage fads, this one dies a death sooner rather than later.

Me and much of my generation was raised by casual, relaxed adults. For the most part. By comparison with today, certainly so. And there’s the story. Unfolding modernity has not been kind, in divers’ ways. There is a presiding cruelty in the world now, that was not so prescient, then.
And the antidote to that cruelty, and whatever else ails us, is hardly to be found within the herd mentality of a mob, of almost any description. There used to be a time when intimates spoke of the necessity in life for a very small handful of very close friends, while no amount of associates and acquaintances add up to a hill of beans when the chips are down, or even up, for that matter. This was solid kitchen-brand wisdom. Reflecting the necessity for wearing adult clothes and endorsing and expressing the solid thinking behind the arrival to that station in life.
I have been chasing the concept of SEL (social emotional learning) around like a crazy lepidopterist with a very small butterfly net, and there is a thing that I just can’t quite put my thumbtack on. Somewhere in my early twenties, I came to realize the importance of emotional health, in life. Not necessarily the same thing as mental health. Not always a thing to be discussed or examined in psychological terms. Especially when contemplating the life of the soul, the dance of the spirt, and other such esoteric activities.
An emotionally healthy social life is a given for much of what most people seek. But it is not achieved within any shortcut sort of expertise (sold for large amounts of money by ‘experts’) or the schlock they serve up to children in classrooms today. When perusing much of the support material for these whackjob ideas, I notice a very obvious thing. The style and motif, the language and the visuals – all seem to jump off the bus somewhere around grade four. Yes, that young. And the ten year-olds in grade 5 are already parsing a kind of acid reflux replay that may clue in the smarter ones to just how clueless the adults in the system actually are.
The theme of youth rebellion has always been a sexy starter. Splendor in the Grass was positively crushing, heartbreaking and wild in its classic beauty. And so on. But whether they know it, or are willing to admit it or not, kids still need adults to be adults – and that is always because they aren’t adults. For any child of any age who has managed to attain that remarkable stage of maturity astonishingly young, I take of my hat to them, and commend them on how rare an accomplishment that actually is. Not to suggest that the natural resting point of anyone under the age of, say, 18 is sheer stupidity. Far from it.
But something has happened to that lovely game of chess, that tennis back and forth, that natural debate, the testing ground, the give and take, the arm wrestles, the challenges – that used to be the rites of passage for stages of maturity that granted increasing levels of freedom. As if the family home was indeed, the correction facility. And the kids were the inmates. And the parents were the wardens.
And the lovely byproduct of all this was the gradual and relentless unfolding of the concept of freedom. It’s qualities, usefulness, desirability, and all things boosting a kid’s self-esteem and confidence. In short, kids learned to dream of freedom. Because it was a good thing. It came with a price tag, and with responsibilities. Freedom was hardly free, or automatic. If it was (very much like trust, when you think about it) then it was a worthless thing – to be tossed around and aside like an encumbrance.
I enjoy a good joke now and then. Like “the smarter we get, the dumber we are” as a stand-in for our over-technologized, compartmentalized, smug and self-satisfied whoop-de-doo world in which we’re all the stars of our own movies and PR campaigns. Anyone who has ever had a good argument with an algorithm knows and understands this, deeply and with feeling. So if the trick is not in our stars and stats, but to actually care, and in a way that suits our ticking inners, then the same rules that motivated very many generations long gone by, still apply. History did very definitely not start tomorrow, and tomorrow and yet again, tomorrow. It is far more of a lifeline than most of us think. And that’s a passage of time illuminating to contemplate. We are in such a hurry to get – where? As far away from the past as quickly as possible?
Mao had a bright idea about that – which became 10 solid years of batshit crazy meltdown, the echoes of it still reverberate 46 years later.
And yes, I do agree. Somewhere beginning in that strange decade, the 1980s, we began to alter so very many things in society that became decidedly kid-unfriendly. We didn’t notice so much at first. But we sure do now. And far too many people just turn that off, as if it’s too painful a thing to contemplate. Like it or not, the kids are our future. They are our continuity. They are a reminder of how damned important this is. They always were. But now we just apparently freak out about it, make a mess of it, and operate with this weird impression that perfection, and even a utopian dream, are the requirements we’re hung out on the line to answer for.
This reminds me of one of my favorite Mark Twain stories in which someone (I forget whom) shows up at the Pearly Gates hoping to pass muster with good old Saint Peter. He brings his dog. Unfortunately, he doesn’t make the cost of admission. But the dog gets in.

Although I can appreciate Hadley’s writing talent, I can’t help but wonder about her sense of practicality. If she was finding coping with babies difficult, why didn’t she seek advice, perhaps from her mother, or other experienced women?
Today’s society seems lacking in basic experience of children. My own was much different. I learned about baby care from seeing how it was done in my family, and I, a boy, earned money looking after other people’s children, as did several of my mates. We changed nappies, and learned about kids from their mothers (1960’s). At 13 or 14, our masculinity was never in question. I learned about sex, too, and it wasn’t shameful, or nasty. I was fortunate, I suppose, to have had good people to learn from.
Nowadays, people seem to live in isolation, and lessons that might have been learned from the past are not possible. Present attitudes and ideologies do not offer positive prospects.

I love the rock climbing analogy. However I don’t blame parents for ‘going along’ with anything short of drugs or surgery. I know several people in this situation. They are trying to maintain a relationship with their child – and they know if they push back the child will hide their intentions. In fact schools, counsellors and physicians may encourage them to do so. Parents know this is a phase for the vast majority of children – they are just hoping they will ride it out without permanent damage. However unlike in the past – they will get no help from any of the institutions that are supposed to guide and protect children. An analogy might be trying to stop your child from getting a tattoo on her face – but the school has a facial tattoo club – encourages students to join – tells them to hide joining from their parents – and the National Tattoo Association tells tattooists that they will be investigated if they refuse to tattoo a child’s face.

It’s not whether the idea comes from teens or adults: it’s whether the idea is right or wrong, wise or foolish. We have had centuries of experience of pondering and debating such matters.

You said, “I don’t know if I’m right..”. Yes, you are right and thanks for speaking out. However, baby-led goes way back. My oldest is 30 and I was into that same crunchy parenting. Thankfully I am also a Christian and homeschooler, so my kids are not quite as screwed up as the rest of them. However, they are very confused like all the rest. Good article. I hope you don’t get cancelled.

“Discussions about gender are often described as “toxic”, and that means they are characterised by tantrums and threats from activists”
That’s been the same for 50 years

“ Younger generations have always looked for ways to differentiate themselves from the stuffy old farts who came before…”

> I do think that this was the case until after the Second World War and also a western phenomenon, principally American.

“Parents defer to their teenaged children about the correct languages to use and opinions to hold.” Isn’t this roughly the Cultural Revolution again? We know how that turned out. Is there a Mao somewhere orchestrating it?

A very good article: as adults, we must fight this ‘infantilisation’ of society and embrace our responsibilities. It is very difficult to have the knowledge and the courage to stand up against the Woke ideology (the sane have become a minority!!) but articles like this help readers in shaping arguments to put forward in relevant discussions.

Fabulous article thank you.

I have past the point where I have to think about the correct ways of raising children but I do resist the cant in the article and comment that insinuates all the dangerous ideas come from the ‘Left’.
I protected my children from dangerous ideology regardless of the source and didn’t expect that any source was infallible. I am pleased to say my children have grown to be happy, intelligent well-centered adults with a minimum of bruising from life.

One may see though, that if it is so easy to label What is a Woman? an appallingly sexist, it is even easier to label this article as appallingly ageist and transphobic.
See, the establishment feminists still believe that their “revolution” stops right there where they achieved pinnacle of power and freedom without having much of a burden of responsibility, henceforth all these baby-driven shortcuts in parenting, so popular with new age single moms.
This is an extremely naive point of view. Saying that old norms should give way to feminist empowerment does open the door to the new generation of challengers, brought up by these new rules, to try and knock the feminists off their moral high grounds. Should we resist these new revolutionaries? By all means yes. Yet the feminists should get off their high horse for a few minutes and do some deeper soul searching instead of indulging in the usual ruling elite hypocrisy.