It is fashionable to blame parents for being “too anxious” which has created a generation of kids too fragile for public life. But these anxieties haven’t come from nowhere. This is how we were told we were supposed to be. For decades, so-called “experts” peddled pseudoscientific theories and magic bullets in the form of parental behaviour management to cure all manner of social ills. The good parent was beatified as one who is aware of every risk and acts accordingly. And woe betide the “lazy” parent who does not. In doing so, they pointed the finger squarely at parents for nearly everything that goes wrong.

Since at least the Seventies, this is how generations have learned to think about problems, both personal and social: “What did the parents do?” At the inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) held last month, even critics of our over-fragile culture could not resist delineating all the ways parenthood has contributed to our censorious and illiberal culture. Phoning in from New York, Jonathan Haidt criticised the rise of the “phone-based childhood” and alluded to its roots in the Nineties when “free play” dwindled and paranoid parents started to think “everyone’s a child molester or rapist”. He was echoing his and Greg Lukianoff’s Coddling of the American Mind, published in 2018, in which they warn about the rise of “helicopter parents”.

Speaking like bewildered farmers whose chickens have come home to roost, they find it difficult to imagine that their own profession, psychology, might have something to do with our age of fragility. Over the years, a voluminous academic literature has mined the minutiae of childhood experience to find the sources of personal and social problems in everything from how parents feed their children (bottle or breast, spoon or “baby-led weaning”) to how many words they say before an ever-lowering crucial age.

In countless self-help books and on endless daytime talk show segments, they educated people in their emotional vulnerability and invited them to scan their childhoods for the sources of their troubles. A litany of minor behaviours became linked to metaphors of toxicity and a swathe of wicked personal and public problems. These experts preached a gospel of emotional vulnerability and now appear shocked that people believed them.

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Consider the widespread policy application of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences). Drawn from a questionnaire devised in 1998, it tallies up adverse experiences in childhood to produce a score said to be predictive of future life outcomes. Under the veil of scientific calculation, it pinpoints the cause of so many issues that had proven resistant to change. And instead of dealing with the tough business of things such as poverty and poor housing, it implied that governments could simply intervene to change the way parents behave. Even Haidt and Lukianoff draw on ACEs in their manifesto for a more robust public life, concluding:

“… there are two very different ways to damage [children’s] development. One is to neglect and underprotect them, exposing them early to severe and chronic adversity… The other is to overmonitor and overprotect them, denying them the thousands of small challenges, risks, and adversities that they need to face on their own in order to become strong and resilient adults.”

So whether you over-protect them or under-protect them, the problem is you. Moreover, besides being criticised for, among other things, downplaying the role of poverty and conflating severe experiences such as childhood sex abuse and not feeling anyone thought you were “special”, it was precisely devices such as the ACE questionnaire that led to the overuse of concepts such as “trauma”. Sure, you might have never lived in a war zone, but add up your bad experiences in childhood and you too can have a coveted claim to emotional damage.

This is a tough narrative to shake. From the speeches of politicians underscoring the importance of the “first three years” to popular books such as Sophie Lewis’s Abolish the Family, there is one point of agreement across the spectrum: Larkin was right. This is the ethos of parental determinism: the notion that what parents do is a key cause determining our personal and societal fate.

Not only does it fail to capture the complexity of the problems that face us, it also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, reducing the control people feel they hold over their lives. This is by design. The rise of parenting expertise happened in concert with the overall proliferation of other forms of pseudo-expertise, a large part of which involved the denigration of the ordinary, uninitiated individual’s ability to adequately manage his affairs. It is an expertise that arose hand in hand with a generalised pessimism about the ability of human beings to manage their fate.

Already by the middle of the 19th century, the enormous optimism about man’s ability to control the course of history that had characterised the “age of Enlightenment” had begun to wane. Optimistic figures of the Enlightenment such as Godwin and Condorcet had pointed to societal impediments to the “future progress of mankind”, and looked forward to the day when, once rooted out, problems would be a distant memory. Yet as many social problems appeared stubbornly resistant to change, a certainty grew that the answers lay not in the external world but in the internal world of the human subject. Society wasn’t the problem. The problem was you and me.

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As Christopher Lasch observed, by the 20th century, social reformers increasingly came to see the family as an obstacle to the social changes they desired. If behaviours and beliefs were now an impediment to progress, it was logical to look to their source — the family and the leading role that parents played therein. Accordingly, once-banal aspects of everyday life came to be referred to as an “art”, communicating a “conception of marriage and the family that derived not so much from aesthetics as from science and technology… When marriage experts said that marriage represented the art of personal ‘interaction,’ they meant that marriage, like everything else, rested on proper technique.” Progressives, Lasch continued, envisaged a day when parenting would be professionalised and “licensed” and the “unfit of the human species” would “cease to reproduce their kind”.

While obviously not everyone took their conclusions to such eugenicist extremes, many members of a new and growing “knowledge class” expressed a similar exasperation with the ordinary individual’s inability to manage his life. Hence even a figure such as Bronisław Malinowski, critical of Freud’s excessive focus on the nuclear family, could see “only one way out” of the “cultural crisis” of his time, the Thirties, as “the establishment of a… scientific control of human affairs.” Since that time, this class has only grown, both responding to such “crises” and, implicitly, responding to its own failure to really solve them.

Part of the difficulty, then, is that ordinary people don’t realise just how stupid they are. They have to be convinced of their incapacity, lest they have no idea that they are going about their lives all wrong. Hence at the beginning of nearly every new psychotherapeutic fad, advocates emerge informing audiences of their perilous inability to do things correctly. And so, a key part of the gospel of emotional vulnerability is the constant preaching that the uninitiated “layperson” is sorely ill-equipped to manage the tough business of living. They need the growing piles of books, apps, and even “wellbeing curriculum” produced by proliferating therapeutic entrepreneurs whose business it is to make a problem of the minutiae of everyday life. In all this, vulnerability has become a sacred ethos, preached to young people and their parents at every turn.

All of which means that we parents are told we cannot simply rely on our own experiences and those of generations before us. After all, that’s where all the problems started — with people who just didn’t know what “we know now”. The result is a complete denial of agency: parents are constantly enjoined to doubt themselves and to “listen to the experts” — and yet, paradoxically, no one seems to look to the experts when things go wrong.

Under leader Giorgia Meloni, it has been decided that only the name of the biological mother within a lesbian couple may appear on their child’s birth certificate, reversing the previous decision of certain Italian municipalities to include both partners. Some town halls are stripping existing parental rights from lesbian partners retrospectively. The grand total of couples involved is said to be 33 — a perfect number, when you want to send a shot across the bows without hitting too many voters along the way.

Luca Ciriani, the minister for parliamentary relations, insisted last month: “In Italy, marriage is only between a man and a woman, and therefore only the biological parent is the parent whose surname can be registered.” (Civil unions, but not marriages, have been around for same-sex-attracted people in Italy since 2016.) Given the international climate, it’s predictable that her party would go in this direction. What is perhaps less predictable, given the heavy presence of lesbians and atheists among them, is that the move has also gone down well with some in the UK fighting for women’s rights.

Tired of the erasure of biological motherhood on multiple fronts these days — whether from activists renaming trans-identified fathers as “mothers”, or from surrogacy enthusiasts presenting a birth mother as a fancy kind of packaging from which a beautiful baby can eventually be unboxed — campaigners such as Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker) and others have endorsed Meloni’s conclusion. Any concessions to the renaming of biological reality are “the thin end of the wedge”, Keen argues — where the thick end presumably involves schoolgirls believing they are boys, transwomen photographing themselves “breastfeeding”, and other forms of present or future definitional anarchy.

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As it happens, I’m named on my youngest child’s birth certificate, though I didn’t give birth to her. My lack of contribution in that respect is made clear by my categorisation as “parent”, while my partner is named, accurately, as “mother”. Such an entry became legally possible in 2009 for lesbians in civil partnerships, bringing parity with what had already been possible for years for heterosexual males, as long as they were in a couple using donor sperm for fertility issues. If there is a wedge here, it started with infertile men being registered as parents of children they did not conceive.

I don’t object at all to the fact of criticism of either practice, and I certainly wouldn’t hurl accusations of homophobia around because of it. Not every objection to the liberalisation of traditional family structures in favour of gay people is homophobic in origin. In an ideal world, I agree, we would each know where — or more specifically, who — we came from, though the world is far from ideal in that respect. According to the Office for National Statistics, in 2021 nearly 5% of birth certificates issued in the UK didn’t record any father at all.

But this isn’t the only point of a birth certificate in any case. The named presence of an adult there also officially gives him or her the set of legal rights and responsibilities associated with being a parent. It is these that have been removed from one half of lesbian co-parenting couples in Italy. In order to be able to do things like pick up a child after school or take over childcare in the event of the birth mother’s death, the excluded partner must now go through a lengthy adoption procedure.

Viewed in this light, naming a second lesbian parent on a child’s birth certificate is a family-friendly move. Arguably, if you squint a bit, it’s even a socially conservative move — though agreeing probably depends on whether you take, as your baseline, a society where lesbians will have children anyway; or whether you think of it as a cultural aberration that could, with discouragement, be stopped. Either way, putting a second lesbian partner on a birth certificate officially defines and legitimises her parenting relation within the family, allowing the burdens and joys to be shared between two adults, and adding a second layer of protection for the child. Family stability is important for good childhood outcomes, and this measure seems to provide some.

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Coincidentally, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act was passed in the UK a decade ago this week. With the benefit of hindsight, it is interesting to revisit the associated parliamentary debate of the Bill, as politicians discussed whether lesbians and gays had the right to nervous breakdowns over table settings and canapé choices like everybody else.

Much of the progressive case for same-sex marriage centred on the notion that the game of marriage — its pleasures and its wider benefits — did not require the pieces on the board to have any particular shape. As Yvette Cooper declared at the time: “We all love the idea of a wedding, we all support the idea of a strong marriage and, clearly, we all like a good party.” The conservative case, meanwhile, focused on sexual difference as the essential basis of a Christian marriage, specifically for the purposes of bringing up children. Yet it seems to me that, as is often the case, both sides overstated things.

Back then, progressives tended to follow the lead of LGB activists in avoiding all discussions of how lesbian or gay partnerships might meaningfully differ from the heterosexual versions. There was a similar code of silence over how lesbian relationships might differ from the gay male kind — bizarrely, since in many ways a female-female couple is the opposite of a male-male one. The general conceit, for the purposes of equality narratives, was (and still is) that any differences — either with heterosexual couples, or with homosexual couples of the opposite sex — are superficial, and that we are all the same really.

Any diversion from this approved line tended to result in immediate cries of homophobia, and still does. It’s a shame, for — as well as having presented a suffocatingly authoritarian blueprint for future transactivists to follow — this strategy has also been counterproductive for child development. Specifically, it has removed any possibility of having constructive, non-judgemental public discussions about how the needs of same-sex parents and their offspring might somewhat differ from those in heterosexual contexts.

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For instance, children growing up in lesbian households ideally need strong emotional connections with adult males as well, whether via family or friends, while kids growing up with gay male parents also need positive relationships with women. This is not something that many progressives are prepared to talk about. Also hard to acknowledge — but still true — is that, like straight male counterparts, gay male parents are on average less likely than females to feel confident in caring for young children. A society that could mention these things easily could also offer more support for those that require it.

It would also be good to freely discuss the potential costs of unknown paternity or maternity for children generally, without getting worried about the sensitivities of gays and lesbians in particular. Relatedly, the gay male use of surrogates is an ethical minefield. It requires an open discussion without kneejerk accusations of bigotry.

Progressives have often steered clear of such points because they fear that a slippery slope is invited towards the conclusion that gay people shouldn’t have children at all — a point on which many Christian contributors to the 2013 parliamentary debate doubtless would agree. But most constituents these days are not practising Christians; and even those who are, are usually pretty liberal. Shorn of a religious framework insisting that, by definition, both a marriage and a family must contain one man and one woman, any ensuing draconian policy implications would be unattractive to most. We aren’t in Catholic Italy.

Recently, I’ve been glued to a Netflix reality show called The Ultimatum, where couples swap partners for three weeks, ostensibly in order to assess whether they are ready for marriage in their own couple. It’s a genius idea that could only attract deliciously watchable dysfunctionality, a promise on which it totally delivers. There’s a lesbian version and a straight version — and it’s fascinating to inspect each series with an eye to differences and similarities.

Yes, lesbians seem to cry more (but only just); and yes, heterosexuals seem to have more sex (but only just); but even so, watching the two series consecutively also reveals the deep similarities between humans looking for lasting love. (Indeed, after watching the first one, only featuring females, I struggled not to read the men in the second as particularly successful butch lesbians.)

If it’s a basic aim of society to produce well-adjusted, happy children in the context of stable, long-lasting romantic relationships — and a lot of evidence suggests it should be — then it would be a wasted opportunity not to offer lesbian and gay couples policy tools that help them contribute to this process. We don’t have to choose between traditional complementarity narratives about marriage or parenting, and a structureless free-for-all in which any permutation is permitted in order to prop up fantasies of exact sameness. Paying attention to real differences between sexual orientations should not preclude keeping our eye on the bigger picture — nor vice versa.

When Byron was 20, Boatswain died of rabies. Devastated, he composed a poem that captures his grief and the sense of losing an irreplaceable relationship:

To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one—and here he lies.

Byron made provision in his will to be interred with Boatswain, but he was hardly the first human to form such a bond; the earliest known remains of humans and dogs buried together date from 14,000 years ago.

Until last week, I’d only ever kept cats, and didn’t really get the dog thing. Then we got a nine-week-old Labrador puppy. Now, my every moment and mood is shadowed by a creature who thinks I’m some kind of divine being, and who wees on the floor whenever she gets excited, which is often. It’s been intense.

But as intense as a baby? A few days into dog wrangling, a friend texted me to ask how “new motherhood” was going. There are plenty of articles which will tell you parenthood and dog ownership are comparable, or that you should try raising a puppy before you try raising a baby as a sort of trial run, or that the former is even harder.

And some dog-owners insist flat out that dogs and kids are on a level. “Am I comparing my dog to your kids?” asks young dog-owner Eva Hall. “Yes, yes I am”, because “I love him as much as you love your kids” and “let’s face it, he’s just better than your kids”. For those, like Hall, who see no distinction between dogs and kids, a puppy isn’t like parenting: it is parenting.

My already well-thumbed copy of Puppies for Dummies reinforces this, referring throughout to “dog parents”. Some of the products that cater to these “dog parents” are startlingly expensive and similar to the baby kit now in my loft. I’m not sure why a dog would need a pushchair, as puppies can walk from three weeks old; but you can still spend £350 on a deluxe dog buggy. There are slings, too; this one has a thousand or so positive reviews, many of which include photos of delighted owners carrying baffled-looking canines, slung like babies on their chests.

It’s true that in the case of both babies and puppies, you build an attuned relationship on caretaking and body-language cues rather than — as with adult friendships — conversation or shared interests. There are also broken nights, the cleaning up of bodily waste, and the sense that you’re in charge of creating a routine for a dependent other.

But I scarcely need list the reasons why a dog is a dog, and a baby is a baby. Yet many seem determined to flatten the distinction. And while it’s common to decry this as “selfish”, or blame the housing crisis for making human offspring unattainable, this trend has also paralleled a wider one, now decades old, away from boundaries, distinctions and formal hierarchies in the way we organise our social life.

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Today household-name management consultancies extol the benefits of “unstructuring” your corporation, and “unschooling” advocates wonder if parents imposing rules on kids creates more problems than it solves. Beneath it all lies a profound ambivalence about authority that’s percolated even into the asymmetrical relationship between owners and their pets.

But while many now seem uncertain about whether love is compatible with being in authority, radical equality even with kids or pets doesn’t always mean more love. Or, at least, it doesn’t always mean the right kind of love.

Over my lifetime, the trend has been away from formal acknowledgement of hierarchies in schools, families and the wider social fabric, toward a more egalitarian style. Parenting norms have shifted toward empathy rather than pulling rank. Advocates of “gentle parenting”, for example, suggest “negotiating limits” with your kids instead of telling them what’s going to happen: not “we’re leaving the park in five minutes” but “how many more goes on the swing shall we have before it’s time to go?” “Peaceful parenting” challenges the idea that “kids are less than”, arguing that it’s wrong to use “privilege as an adult” to control children’s actions and feelings. Instead, the child’s autonomy is emphasised; some even advocate asking a baby or toddler for consent before changing a nappy.

And as more parents seek to place kids on the same level as them, something similar is afoot with pets. The “multispecies family” is so pronounced a trend it is the subject of books and academic research, and three American states have recently passed laws obliging courts to treat pets as family members rather than possessions in divorce cases.

This all suggests a deep ambivalence about whether love and authority are compatible full stop. For the egalitarians, this is never the case. Children are an oppressed class; and pets are “infantilised objects of resource in a speciesist society”, forced to live in environments that do “psychological violence” to them.

This would, I suspect, have baffled the aristocratic Byron, for all that he loved his dog. If Boatswain’s epitaph is anything to go by, for him the dog wasn’t a substitute baby but something more like a deeply-loved feudal retainer:

The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone

It would have flummoxed my farming grandparents, too. They kept a working dog, a relationship that has the same feudal undertone as the one Byron describes. Their dog was a member of the household, scrupulously well-cared-for but given clear rules that marked her out as absolutely not on a level with the humans.

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In contrast, a growing number of dog owners shrink from the idea of such a distinction in status. Such people would reject the term “owner”, preferring to anthropomorphise their canines, or otherwise emphasise the parity between them: for example by donning a matching dog costume to play with them or letting them into the bed.

But this comes with downsides, too. The arguments against swapping authority for empathy in parenting usually point to badly-behaved children. And if poorly-managed children may cover your walls in Sharpie, poorly-managed dogs may just be sharp. These are the creatures that gnaw at furniture, or maul livestock or humans — and who end up being euthanised.

And along with the risk that too-egalitarian a relationship will make for open season on misbehaviour in kids or animals, comes the creeping possibility that it will do so for adults as well. For once you argue that kids and animals are on a level with adults, and their autonomy a key factor in the relationship, you’re close to claiming — as the advocates for nappy-changing permission do — that we should elicit the consent of children or animals to the way we treat them.

If you’re arguing that kids and pets should consent, though, that implies they can. On the face of it, this sounds good and compassionate. But “consent” also implies a relationship between relative equals, in which both parties have similar levels of autonomy. Where this is understood to be the case, between adults, the modern world routinely treats consent as an adequate substitute for moral rules: we don’t need to say any action is wrong in an absolute sense, if everyone affected agreed to it.

Most people understand that the difference in capacity between an adult and dependent pet or child is so great that such a “consent” model only applies in a very limited sense. But the radical push to flatten all structures pulls us in the opposite direction — and for a minority, this leads to dark places.

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For it’s also now a mainstream view that consent is the sole arbiter of whether a sexual act is acceptable. So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that as parenting and pet-care have become more radically egalitarian, a few are tempted to imagine the capacity for “consent” some now ascribe to children and animals in other areas of life might apply here as well.

One recent book by a UK academic argues that while sexual intimacy between humans and animals is often abusive, it needn’t be by definition. And it may or may not be a coincidence that the same writer who declared “‘parent’ is an oppressive class” worked as Communications Director for Prostasia, an organisation that supports the “liberation” of “minor-attracted people” from stigma.

For most, the retreat from authority is not a step toward abuse, just a well-intentioned effort to avoid undue harshness when in a position of authority over kids or pets. But while authority may be misused, asymmetries of power and responsibility don’t go away just because you wish they weren’t there. Children and domestic animals are genuinely in need of adult guidance if they are to integrate into the human social fabric. Refusing to provide this isn’t compassion, it’s cowardice.

More seriously still, abdicating our responsibility to accept the obligations that come with being in authority over dependents risks abuses far worse than badly-behaved kids or pets. For pretending we’re on a level with our pets or kids doesn’t diminish the power we have over them. It just makes it easier to conceal that power, and convince ourselves they’ve consented, as equals, to whatever it is we desire. And very few individuals have no desires they’re ashamed of.

It’s not just unruly dogs that need to be kept on a leash, but also the dark side of humans. If we’re to wield power responsibly in our households, we owe it to our dependents to acknowledge where it lies.

But until recently, it seemed like we were all meant to aspire to the own-nothing-and-be-happy life. It’s a vision in which travel is easy, possessions are minimal (and delivered by drone), work happens remotely on a laptop, and different geographies aren’t homes so much as flavours to sample on a tasting menu.

Perhaps no voice expresses this more elegantly than the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, who this week wrote a plaintive defence of the frictionless life: “The myth of the man-child”.

The childless bachelor male, Ganesh claims, isn’t a perpetual adolescent. Far from it: this figure is cultivated, high-minded, “austere” and well-travelled, with “a decorum, almost a formality, born of aversion to the smells, stains and general boisterousness of a kid-filled home”. The most adult conversations, Ganesh reports, “are with the childless”.

This isn’t the first defence of the frictionless life he’s written. Shortly before the pandemic hit in earnest, he made “The climate case for childlessness”, in which he acknowledged that it’s not really about climate at all, but a desire to stay unencumbered. It’s about “a taste for leisure, a dread of sexual monotony”. He and others like him did not, he says, “hate to ‘bring a child into this world’ […] so much as into our diaries”.

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And this is driven, he claims, by a desire for “maximum control” over life: “I know with some precision the list of cities in which I want to pass the rest of this decade, and in what sequence” — a plan that, he acknowledges, wouldn’t be workable with a spouse and children in tow. Ganesh realises this makes him selfish. But he sees this as “a bid for a more, not a less serious life”.

There was a time I would have nodded energetically along with this idea. I wanted, I would say, joy rather than contentment. (I’m pretty sure I recall claiming that the latter emotion merely ‘bovine’.) I spent my twenties living light, travelling lots, and resisting the accumulation of permanent possessions or obligations.

I could have bought a flat in London back when it was affordable; but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be tied down. Nor did I want a long-term relationship. I didn’t feel stable or coherent enough to tolerate the sheer consistency of commitment to just one other person.

As for the most serious such commitment there is — children — the prospect gave me recurring nightmares. In this I was an early adopter of a now-mainstream Western trend: to remain “child-free”. Many frame this in ecological terms, as in the recent COP26 protest by Population Matters aimed at encouraging people to breed less to save the earth. But a recent Pew poll reported the most common reason given by childless Americans for their decision is simply “I just don’t want to”.

I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on Ganesh, who is thoughtful and clearly aware of the inverse correlation between freedom and intimacy. “Our horizons widen as our commitments narrow,” he observes in his defence of the ‘man-child’. Or, as he puts it differently in a column mourning the decline of expat city-states: “shallowness can be emancipating”.

Even as he defends the atomised hyper-liberal lifestyle, Ganesh is not insensible to what can be lost. He comments, for example, on the way pets “fill a hole” for many millennials in a way allotments, or religion, or volunteering might once have done: “Their dog or cat is the only endothermic mammal that some outwardly successful peers can count on for affection, or don’t have to walk on eggshells around.”

And in any case, even he is uncomfortably aware that his preferred way of life as a “middle class world citizen” may be on borrowed time. Climate anxiety, political instability, middle-class wage stagnation and, more recently, pandemic restrictions all militate against the democratic opening-up of the world to mass frictionlessness.

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But here’s the rub: swapping emancipation for shallowness is less enjoyable when you can’t afford the consumerist upside of minimal ties. One of the first columns I ever wrote here discussed the growing demographic who have embraced liberal atomisation, only to find changing economic conditions have denied them the disposable income that makes being unencumbered fun.

It’s all very well rejecting loyalties and obligations, if your earnings open the full range of upscale world-citizenship for your delectation. But Ganesh has little to offer those who lose this abundance. His best suggestion is that if you own nothing, having spent your twenties acquiring memories, you can always be happy by marrying into money in your thirties. It scarcely needs saying that while this might at a pinch be plausible advice for the kind of 20-something who reads the Financial Times, it’s unlikely to be of use more generally.

For the bottom tier of the new knowledge class is materially increasingly difficult to distinguish from gig-economy proles: both groups own nothing, and neither seems especially happy. Political unrest is rising and, as I’ve argued, the principal distinction between the Left-wing version of this discontent — antifa — and its alt-Right counterpart is cultural.

Some have belatedly realised they traded deep commitments for horizons that aren’t wide at all but shrinking rapidly. Happily not all of these disappointed would-be world citizens have responded by setting cities on fire. And it’s far from a foregone conclusion that the unlucky also-rans who got the atomisation but not the spending-money are all doomed to a future eating mealworm slurry in tiny one-person ‘pod’ homes.

Many are responding in far more constructive ways. For every doomer meme or creepy WEF video, subcultures are emerging in which people raised to be maximally individualist are trying to work out how to live together. In its most mundane form, this looks like a backlash against waiting till your thirties to have kids, or young parents writing about how to rebuild local community. In its more Bay Area-esque form, the social organiser Richard Bartlett is working on strategies for making ‘decentralised’ communities more capable of long-term interpersonal commitment, and thus less vulnerable to the well-documented tendency utopias have of imploding.

Or further out on the apocalyptic spectrum lie green land-based projects such as the Rizoma Field School, which is one of a growing network of families and groups attempting what adherents call ‘Doomer Optimism’: an approach to life based on the idea that things will probably get a lot worse, but that all is not lost if we can find ‘regenerative paths forward’. It seeks to develop sustainable forms of farming and community life, and also teach them to others. Many of these are a long way from the egalitarian ideals of the hippie commune era, and often explicitly opposed to the progressive and hyper-individualist ideas that drove such utopian ventures.

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Will any of this work? ‘Doomer optimist’, smallholder and sustainability academic Jason Snyder is acutely aware of the difficulties likely to be faced by the first generations after Peak Frictionlessness. “An uprooted generation will suffer all sorts of embarrassing contradictions as they try to relocalise,” he observed earlier this year. “They should do it anyway”.

I won’t bore you with how I came to reconsider my commitment to the frictionless life, beyond saying I’m glad I did so just about young enough to form a family before I got too old for that option to be open. But Snyder is right: adjusting to a life organised around the commitments I always feared hasn’t always been easy. It’s not uncommon for family members to get exasperated with me when I do something that implies I still think of myself as a solitary atom-self rather than a member of the team.

I don’t think I’m the only voluntary adopter of a more encumbered life to wrestle with this. The Bay Area technologist Venkatesh Rao captured something of the resulting ambivalence recently. In an increasingly politically unstable world, Rao acknowledged, the frictionless life may be less prudent than stockpiling supplies and working for a durable, secure home. Even so, he doesn’t seem wholly thrilled, tweeting nostalgically: “Remember when the ideal was a backpack, phone, passport, credit card?”. In contrast: “Owning lots of shit and supplies is a PITA [pain in the arse]”.

But what else can we do? Ganesh is right that narrower commitments mean wider horizons. But that’s assuming you can afford to enjoy those wider horizons. And for the rest, when emancipation is unaffordable, all you get is the shallowness.

In response, growing numbers are struggling, however clumsily, to rebuild all those commitments we were raised to discard. It might not work, but I refuse to be cynical towards anyone who’s trying. After all, some loves are worth sacrificing a measure of freedom for. And as the world grows stranger and more unstable, perhaps these are all we’ll be able to rely on.

Her protagonist picks blue, and is initially delighted, having been told all her life that motherhood is an intolerable burden. Only later does the girl wonder if that’s true, as she looks at another blue ticket plucker:

“She seemed truly happy. Her skin was smooth, her clothes seemed expensive. I wondered what she might do afterwards with her day, where she worked, what her house was like, whether she was bound to anyone or anything, whether she was thankful for her freedom.”

Separated from their white ticket counterparts, blue tickets live in a world where there is no family of any kind. They spend their time partying, hooking up with unattached men, and pursuing demanding careers, assured that they should be “thankful” for their very specific kind of freedom. A freedom from the responsibility and limitations imposed by parenthood, and particularly motherhood. It is a kind of freedom that was almost unknown to our ancestors, but is increasingly the norm in the modern West.

More from this author

Would you like endless pleasure?

By Louise Perry

Mackintosh, 31, does not have children. Nor do roughly 40% of her peers. Some of those women will go on to have children over the next decade or so, but many will not. This fate has not been assigned randomly by the state, as in Mackintosh’s novel, but is, instead, the result of much messier forms of social change — the effects of which have been accumulating over time.

Around 18% of women in England and Wales born in 1972 reached the end of their childbearing years not having had children, compared with only 10% of women born in 1945. Millennials are projected to continue the trend. As of 2019, the total fertility rate in England and Wales is at a historic low of 1.7, and the Covid-19 crisis may lower that still further. All in all, it is quite plausible that at least 1 in 4 people of my generation will not be having children.

Financial insecurity and rising property prices are often cited as reasons for this, and there is no doubt that millennials are not only worse off than their parents’ generation, but also acutely aware of it. I used to agree with the argument that, as one young writer put it, “[y]oung people still need to get onto the first rung on the housing ladder to get onto the wedding ladder and the kids ladder … and that pushes any dreams of 2.4 children well into the distance.” In other words: it’s the economy, stupid.

But I’m not so sure now that the numbers stack up. There is a near-perfect correlation between a nation’s GDP and its fertility rate: globally, poor people have more children, not fewer. The same holds true in this country, since even as the total fertility rate has declined, poorer Britons have continued to have more children on average than their wealthier counterparts, and tend to start their families younger too. Poverty does not preclude childbearing — in fact, it seems to do the opposite.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

An income-rich, asset-poor millennial friend once insisted that she couldn’t possibly afford children; she later reconsidered, recognising that she could, but it would mean buying a house outside London, having fewer holidays, eating out less often — all in all, making sacrifices that she wasn’t prepared to make, at least not in her twenties. The issue isn’t how much money today’s young people actually have, but how they prioritise their spending.

The reality is that declining fertility is not a phenomenon affecting every section of society evenly. When we talk about falling rates of childbearing across the Western world, what we’re really talking about is falling rates of childbearing among graduates.

Danny Dorling, professor of human geography at Sheffield University, describes the sharp distinction:

“Society has split into two groups. One group, of women graduates, clustered particularly in London and the commuter belt, is having children very late and the rest are having them at much the same age as their mothers and their grandmothers did.”

This first group of highly educated people, both male and female, is also the group most likely not to have children at all. In contrast, working-class people are more likely to hold on to traditional family values that include a disapproval of voluntary childlessness. In our society, blue tickets are not picked by lottery, but they’re not exactly randomly selected either: there are strong demographic forces at play, with class being the most important one.

So why are graduates choosing not to have kids? Some environmental activists celebrate the decline in birth rates and so-called “BirthStrikers” reject parenthood in order not to further burden an already over-burdened planet. I do know twenty-somethings who are fervent enough in their political beliefs that they have signed anti-natalist pledges, but a vanishingly small number of people actually choose to have children, or not have children, based on such abstract concerns.

I simply don’t believe most of my peers who say that they’re choosing to be childless out of fear for the climate. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, for instance, have committed to having only two children in a display of environmentalist piety, but have made no commitment to reducing their air travel or the number of homes they own. Appealing to the health of the planet is a socially acceptable explanation for reduced childbearing, but not a candid one.

Suggested reading

Will Britain join the European baby push?

By Colin Brazier

No, I see two plausible ways of explaining the rise of the elite blue tickets, neither of which involve climate change or financial insecurity.

The first possible explanation is linked to the fact that sometimes affluence reveals differences within populations that were always there, but used to be invisible. Variation in appetite, for instance, is indiscernible in an environment of food scarcity, since the greedy and the abstemious are equally limited in how much they can eat. It’s only in an affluent society like ours that the abundant availability of cheap calories allows such traits to surface, with some people — but only some people — becoming obese as a result.

Perhaps, like appetite, a longing for parenthood is a visceral thing and you either have it or you don’t. Perhaps in the past there was always some proportion of people who had no interest in childbearing, but had little choice in the matter, particularly if they were women.

We know that voluntary childlessness is linked to personality, which is highly heritable, so there might always be a chunk of people who, given the option, would prefer not to have children. And now, with contraception, and feminism, and the decline of religion, and all of the other factors that have turned our world upside down, that option is newly available to people with the education and means to choose their own path. “Not every woman goes gooey at the sight of a toddler taking their first step,” insists one young writer, “there are others who quite simply do not want kids. Ever.” And isn’t that their prerogative?

This personality-based explanation seems plausible enough, but I wonder if there may be an additional ideological explanation for why rising childlessness is affecting only one section of Western society — perhaps not coincidentally, the same section of society that has most fiercely embraced a liberal individualism that dominates in today’s universities.

Let’s be honest — children are hard work. They scream, they complain, they make a mess. They limit your leisure time, your sex life, your travel, and your socialising. In our economic system, children limit earning potential because they limit mobility and flexibility, especially for mothers (the gender pay gap is actually a maternity pay gap). All in all, kids limit freedom.

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No one has the 'right' to have a baby

By Louise Perry

If you subscribe to an ideology that privileges freedom above all else, then why on earth would you want children? It is a sure-fire way to sabotage your beauty, your leisure time, and your ability to buy high-status consumables: the things that matter most according to an ideology that prizes immediate and visible success and enjoyment over everything else. Children do offer pleasures, but they are complicated, costly, and delayed. So if you are a liberal individualist and you don’t find within yourself a visceral longing for parenthood, then the solution is simple: opt out.

The most energetically liberal baby boomers succeeded in eroding the stigma associated with voluntary childlessness, thus granting greater social freedom to later generations who have been born into a world in which choosing to be childless is — for the first time ever — relatively normal. Hence the gradual dwindling of childbearing in the decades since the 1960s — from 10% childlessness, to 18%, to (maybe) 25% or more. This is a cumulative social change, not a sudden one.

People used to have children because of tradition, or religion, or social pressure, or just because they couldn’t access contraception. But, unlike their working-class peers, most of today’s graduates are not subject to these pressures any more and so for them the decision to try for children is based on only one question: do you like kids?

Looked at from this perspective, it’s no surprise that so many young graduates are choosing to be childless. It is a perfectly defensible decision in our ideological environment, and any costs will be paid down the track, or perhaps not at all, at least at the individual level.

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Parents don't want tips from the childless

By Sarah Ditum

Birth rates are difficult from a policy perspective, since they are simultaneously of profound national importance, and also profoundly personal. On the one hand, we have environmentalists urging us to have fewer children. On the other, economists warn of a looming demographic crisis if birth rates keep falling. At the centre of the drama are all of us, with our hotly contested bodies.

Will a generation of blue tickets change their minds, as Sophie Mackintosh’s protagonist does? Will they conclude that actually not being “bound to anyone or anything” is not the life they want? Some might, only to find themselves coming up hard against age-related infertility; others might be quite happy to live without children. It remains to be seen what our society might look like as voluntary childlessness is increasingly normalised — maybe even, one day, becoming the majority choice.

It’s quite possible that it might not matter. We could yet find a way of solving environmental and economic problems without fiddling with birth rates, and it may be that a population that spends less time on childrearing will have more time to spend on other valuable pursuits. But it’s worth remembering that speculative fiction — from The Handmaid’s Tale to Children of Men — is consistently gloomy about what happens to a society in which babies are in short supply.

That was my brief foray into tribal politics before I became an informal adviser to David Cameron as he tried to modernise the Tory party and later, briefly, his speechwriter. Like many young people exploring politics, my views evolved with maturity from a mushy dislike of Thatcherism’s toughest edges through to fierce libertarianism. But as Edwina Currie said in one of my favourite quotes: everyone is a libertarian until they have children.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Certainly this was true for me. I remain a liberal, opposed to overbearing control of individuals or the economy. But now I understand the powerful need for community and state to bind together society.

For when your child is born profoundly disabled, it changes everything in your life — including your politics. My life was comfortable and smooth until the birth of my daughter 26 years ago. I went into national newspaper journalism after private school, university and a local paper in the West Midlands. My wife had a thriving career. But all that was shattered with the arrival of our second child. Seizures started wracking her tiny body a few weeks after birth. We soon discovered she was visually impaired and would never walk or talk, although complex epilepsy — a horrible condition — remains the core difficulty. A decade ago, we gained a label for her problems, with diagnosis of a newly-discovered genetic condition called CDKL5.

The impact of such a revelation is like a terrible crash. Your life is derailed, your plans wrecked, your dreams dissolve. I went through depression, which later I learned was a form of grieving for the child I had thought I was going to have, before slow acceptance of the gorgeous daughter who really had arrived. Yet even as you emerge from this darkness, you are buffeted by the awful battles that you find to your horror accompany such trauma. You are confronted by a system that is supposed to support parents but instead simply adds to the anguish, the confusion and the exhaustion as you try to navigate a bureaucratic maze you had no desire to enter. Meanwhile you attempt to hold together your family, your friendships, your career. It is no surprise many crumble under such pressure.

More from this author

Our scandalous disregard for disability

By Ian Birrell

This was my political awakening: a profound and highly personal insight into the failings of the state while also witnessing its importance in supporting citizens in crisis. I have seen first-hand — and later as a journalist — that behind the hollow worship of the National Health Service lies an often inadequate system that fails many of those most in need. This is seen again with recent shocking revelations of how the NHS locks up hundreds of people with autism and learning disabilities in abusive detention. Many staff are brilliant; one palliative care team held us afloat at a desperate time. Others can be arrogant, blasé and breathtakingly patronising towards parents and patients. Not all doctors and nurses are saints.

When you meet other parents in the same situation, it is like being members of a secret club with shared experiences that everyone else struggles to comprehend. You soon learn the frustration of repeating endlessly the basic details of your child’s condition to medics and officials who have not bothered to glance at their notes after you have spent another night of screams, seizures and sleeping on the floor to protect your child.

You suffer the bewilderment of confronting the paucity of services, even school places, as you enter the underworld of disability in a society that seems not to care about such citizens. Social workers seem to change annually. Departments bicker over budgets. You rely on people who ignore emails and imply they know best. Then you fall off the cliff again when you move into adult services and are forced to start afresh. No wonder you cling desperately to those people who show humanity and real desire to help.

More from this series

The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

Many of the key problems are down to resources since it can be costly to support people with severe disabilities. The care system, for example, has fallen into such decay that it has become a national disgrace — yet note how debate focuses on middle-class families forced to sell homes to fund care for elderly relatives. It is simplistic to focus only on funding, however, when problems are attitudinal as well as systemic. It is about power, about politics, about people.

The biggest hurdle for families such as mine is not coping with dramatically changed life circumstances, although that is challenging, costly and relentless, but coping with a dysfunctional system and societal indifference. It is still hideous to watch my daughter have a seizure — and I have seen hundreds over the years. But with the right support, which we managed to win finally with health service and local authority backing, she has a good life.

So how did it change my politics? One legacy is deep scepticism towards the state and those proclaiming its brilliance, from the sacred health system through to that creaking care system. This leaves me annoyed when I hear weary platitudes about the wonders of the NHS, when for all its fiscal efficiencies it has poor outcomes on many key conditions as well as inadequate patient safety history, especially for some most in need such as people with learning disabilities.

Another consequence is despair over politics after seeing the complacency and incompetence of too many in power when confronted with problems that are devastating the lives of those who need help. My loathing for tribalism has intensified, along with my readiness to challenge charities that fail to serve the people they claim to help. I have always been contrary but my concerns over abuse of power, the arrogance of privilege and the platitudes that accompany contemporary politics have grown far stronger.

More from this author

Can we be trusted with euthanasia?

By Ian Birrell

Yet I am no longer a libertarian. I have learned the crucial importance of the state, families and communities in assisting the most vulnerable citizens in society. This is why it was criminally irresponsible of the coalition government to overload austerity on local authorities, saving Whitehall some pain but storing up huge problems that have now exploded into slashed local services, school exclusions and lack of respite support.

This desire for stronger communities was why I admired the original idea of the Big Society, before it became entwined with simply cutting the public sector. It is why I despair over the toxicity of Brexit as it inflames divisions. And it is why I focus much of my domestic journalism on attempting to highlight social problems afflicting some of the most excluded and traumatised in society, from addicts through to refugees, prisoners, failed patients and people with disabilities.

The arrival of a child can change a human being: with that fusion of adoration and concern, they become instantly central to existence. When that child is different or profoundly disabled, you rapidly discover that you face a lonely and long fight for the basic things in life that most other parents take as normal. Just look at how many youngsters with autism are excluded from schools, how people with disabilities are excluded from the diversity debate, how many people with learning disabilities die through sheer indifference in hospitals. You worry over what will happen as you grow older or are no longer around.

My interest in politics has never waned, even in these tumultuous days when Westminster has been infected with such puerility and populism. Yet I have learned it is not a game, some kind of spectator sport — but a struggle of immense importance that can make the difference between survival and disaster, even sometimes life or death.

This piece was originally published on 15 Oct 2019

The last few years of politics have tested loyalties and fractured tribes; for many, it’s tempting to disengage altogether. We have asked contributors to remind us of why politics matters, by reflecting on their formative years. This series of political awakenings shows how family, feelings and unlikely accidents can shape a lifetime of politics…

I was one of those strange kids who was always interested in politics, almost as a spectator sport, learning the names of prime ministers alongside those of great footballers. When I went to university, I wandered around the freshers’ fair several times debating which party to join before plumping for the Conservatives. This was largely down to inate contrariness rather than any sense of ideology beyond an instinctive liberalism. One year later I was president. Then I went to a Federation of Conservative Students conference, witnessed overt racism and pulled my branch out of the organisation to the fury of the Party chairman.

That was my brief foray into tribal politics before I became an informal adviser to David Cameron as he tried to modernise the Tory party and later, briefly, his speechwriter. Like many young people exploring politics, my views evolved with maturity from a mushy dislike of Thatcherism’s toughest edges through to fierce libertarianism. But as Edwina Currie said in one of my favourite quotes: everyone is a libertarian until they have children.

Suggested reading

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

Certainly this was true for me. I remain a liberal, opposed to overbearing control of individuals or the economy. But now I understand the powerful need for community and state to bind together society.

For when your child is born profoundly disabled, it changes everything in your life — including your politics. My life was comfortable and smooth until the birth of my daughter 26 years ago. I went into national newspaper journalism after private school, university and a local paper in the West Midlands. My wife had a thriving career. But all that was shattered with the arrival of our second child. Seizures started wracking her tiny body a few weeks after birth. We soon discovered she was visually impaired and would never walk or talk, although complex epilepsy — a horrible condition — remains the core difficulty. A decade ago, we gained a label for her problems, with diagnosis of a newly-discovered genetic condition called CDKL5.

The impact of such a revelation is like a terrible crash. Your life is derailed, your plans wrecked, your dreams dissolve. I went through depression, which later I learned was a form of grieving for the child I had thought I was going to have, before slow acceptance of the gorgeous daughter who really had arrived. Yet even as you emerge from this darkness, you are buffeted by the awful battles that you find to your horror accompany such trauma. You are confronted by a system that is supposed to support parents but instead simply adds to the anguish, the confusion and the exhaustion as you try to navigate a bureaucratic maze you had no desire to enter. Meanwhile you attempt to hold together your family, your friendships, your career. It is no surprise many crumble under such pressure.

More from this author

Our scandalous disregard for disability

By Ian Birrell

This was my political awakening: a profound and highly personal insight into the failings of the state while also witnessing its importance in supporting citizens in crisis. I have seen first-hand — and later as a journalist — that behind the hollow worship of the National Health Service lies an often inadequate system that fails many of those most in need. This is seen again with recent shocking revelations of how the NHS locks up hundreds of people with autism and learning disabilities in abusive detention. Many staff are brilliant; one palliative care team held us afloat at a desperate time. Others can be arrogant, blasé and breathtakingly patronising towards parents and patients. Not all doctors and nurses are saints.

When you meet other parents in the same situation, it is like being members of a secret club with shared experiences that everyone else struggles to comprehend. You soon learn the frustration of repeating endlessly the basic details of your child’s condition to medics and officials who have not bothered to glance at their notes after you have spent another night of screams, seizures and sleeping on the floor to protect your child.

You suffer the bewilderment of confronting the paucity of services, even school places, as you enter the underworld of disability in a society that seems not to care about such citizens. Social workers seem to change annually. Departments bicker over budgets. You rely on people who ignore emails and imply they know best. Then you fall off the cliff again when you move into adult services and are forced to start afresh. No wonder you cling desperately to those people who show humanity and real desire to help.

More from this series

The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

Many of the key problems are down to resources since it can be costly to support people with severe disabilities. The care system, for example, has fallen into such decay that it has become a national disgrace — yet note how debate focuses on middle-class families forced to sell homes to fund care for elderly relatives. It is simplistic to focus only on funding, however, when problems are attitudinal as well as systemic. It is about power, about politics, about people.

The biggest hurdle for families such as mine is not coping with dramatically changed life circumstances, although that is challenging, costly and relentless, but coping with a dysfunctional system and societal indifference. It is still hideous to watch my daughter have a seizure — and I have seen hundreds over the years. But with the right support, which we managed to win finally with health service and local authority backing, she has a good life.

So how did it change my politics? One legacy is deep scepticism towards the state and those proclaiming its brilliance, from the sacred health system through to that creaking care system. This leaves me annoyed when I hear weary platitudes about the wonders of the NHS, when for all its fiscal efficiencies it has poor outcomes on many key conditions as well as inadequate patient safety history, especially for some most in need such as people with learning disabilities.

Another consequence is despair over politics after seeing the complacency and incompetence of too many in power when confronted with problems that are devastating the lives of those who need help. My loathing for tribalism has intensified, along with my readiness to challenge charities that fail to serve the people they claim to help. I have always been contrary but my concerns over abuse of power, the arrogance of privilege and the platitudes that accompany contemporary politics have grown far stronger.

More from this author

Can we be trusted with euthanasia?

By Ian Birrell

Yet I am no longer a libertarian. I have learned the crucial importance of the state, families and communities in assisting the most vulnerable citizens in society. This is why it was criminally irresponsible of the coalition government to overload austerity on local authorities, saving Whitehall some pain but storing up huge problems that have now exploded into slashed local services, school exclusions and lack of respite support.

This desire for stronger communities was why I admired the original idea of the Big Society, before it became entwined with simply cutting the public sector. It is why I despair over the toxicity of Brexit as it inflames divisions. And it is why I focus much of my domestic journalism on attempting to highlight social problems afflicting some of the most excluded and traumatised in society, from addicts through to refugees, prisoners, failed patients and people with disabilities.

The arrival of a child can change a human being: with that fusion of adoration and concern, they become instantly central to existence. When that child is different or profoundly disabled, you rapidly discover that you face a lonely and long fight for the basic things in life that most other parents take as normal. Just look at how many youngsters with autism are excluded from schools, how people with disabilities are excluded from the diversity debate, how many people with learning disabilities die through sheer indifference in hospitals. You worry over what will happen as you grow older or are no longer around.

My interest in politics has never waned, even in these tumultuous days when Westminster has been infected with such puerility and populism. Yet I have learned it is not a game, some kind of spectator sport — but a struggle of immense importance that can make the difference between survival and disaster, even sometimes life or death.