Ambitious parents are instrumental in childhood’s modern malaise

The run-up to Christmas was also the season for piano exams. I was waiting with my youngest in some soulless hall, when a boy of about 8 arrived with his father and two teachers, all of them whispering last-minute instructions at him. The organiser had to prevent the father accompanying his son into the exam room: children must perform on their own, he explained. This seemed to be a new idea.

When my own child trooped off to his fate at the keyboard, I asked the father which grade his son was taking. “Grade 1” he replied: beginner level. Whoa, I thought: this was a truly vertiginous level of helicopter parenting. But from “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, perhaps, he envisaged a career at Goldman Sachs would follow.

Raising three children in central London, I’ve seen my fair share of over-parenting: Dads screaming abuse on touchlines and Mums doing their kids’ homework. But this latest example upset me. Music is one of the greatest gifts you can give a child. For me, playing the piano has been a life-long form of therapy. But a music teacher tells me he sees many wealthy families push their kids as hard as possible to play instruments until they are about 14, at which point they abruptly switch focus to GCSEs. The ones with talent are devastated — the others have already been put off music for life.

Modern children can seem instrumental to the ambitions of their parents. I now realise how lucky we Generation Xers were, to have parents who considered achievements to be ours, not theirs. Mine never took credit for my successes; nor did they bail me out of failures. They worried about me, of course — but took care not to transmit those worries to me.

Perhaps this is what has changed. The flipside of ambition, after all, is often fear. Our children face a deluge of depressing information: about climate change, automation, war and poverty. They, and we, are constantly being told that the stakes are high. That if they don’t land the right internship, they’ll never get on the housing ladder. Some parents — like the pregnant mother I met touring a posh Notting Hill nursery — conclude they must start the race even before birth.

This is not irrational. In Love, Money and Parenting, the economists Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zilibotti find that raising kids has become more intense in countries with greater inequality. They contrast the US and UK with Scandinavia, arguing that rising financial returns from a university degree have made Brits and Americans try much harder than in the 1970s to get their offspring into top institutions.

At the extreme, of course, this has led to some families in the US cheating their way into top colleges. Yet in the sensational coverage of the alleged college fixer William “Rick” Singer, it was rarely asked what message bribery sent to the teenagers who supposedly benefited.

Few are immune to wondering whether we are failing our children by not being pushy enough. I have endless school gate discussions about this — often with fellow working mothers who worry that stay-at-home friends may be right to focus relentlessly on their child’s career, rather than their own.

Part of this guilt is feeling that we modern parents are everywhere and nowhere. We ask our kids if they’ve done their homework, but too often we are stuck on our phones at that vital moment when they might have wanted to tell us something. We blame social media for its myriad failings, but we are addicted too. The scene around our Christmas table was predictable, with shouts of “put your phone away!” But it was the teenagers doing the shouting — at the parental scrolling.

I have spent years worrying about the possible effects of screens on my children. A new study, from the University of Michigan, finds that pre-school kids don’t learn to regulate their emotions properly if they are regularly handed a smartphone or iPad to distract them. While it may deflect an immediate tantrum, the researchers say, the intervention makes toddlers far more likely to have emotional meltdowns. Reading this, I suddenly wondered if the same might apply to us grown-ups too.

The days between Christmas and New Year ought to be a blissful time to switch off. This year, the younger generation seem better at this than me. Our eldest son has asked our youngest to lock his phone away, so that he can relax without interruption. In contrast I, the self-professed Grinch of Tech, am sending online New Year greetings to make up for Christmas cards I didn’t get round to posting; replying embarrassingly rapidly to WhatsApps, and checking the news, unable to tear myself away from the full horror of the world.

The pandemic accelerated trends of depression and anxiety in young people — lockdowns represented a bigger proportion of their lives. In the UK, growing numbers of university students have called the mental health service Nightline. A recent NHS survey says that 75 per cent of 17 to 19-year-old girls now have a “possible eating problem”. This makes it even more imperative that we parents try to curb our own behaviour: a welter of studies show that parental anxiety is contagious.

But many parents have not fully recovered from pandemic burnout. Those with school-age children reported higher levels of mental distress during Covid than other groups. Some described a crippling apathy and fatigue from the relentless effort to balance everything.

So my New Year’s resolution? Worry less. Oh, and let’s preserve music for what it is: a way to spread joy in the world, a way to shield ourselves from anxiety, not to build the CV.

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