Lessons in parenting – from the French

I am actively contributing to the decline of the West and to the collapse of our civilisation. I realised this last week when I found myself standing behind a metal turnstile in the French Alps watching my smallish son, on the other side of the turnstile, step into a bubble lift going up the mountain to the nursery slope. He was with an instructor from the French Ski School, the ESF, surrounded by other children and entirely safe. He’s just turned seven, yet I behaved like a distressed cow watching her calf hauled off to market. I weaved and bobbed trying to keep him in my line of sight; craned over the barrier with mad, staring eyes. My son’s class was les flocons, the snowflakes, and each child had a large snowflake printed on his yellow bib. Some small part of me recognised how comically fitting that snowflake was, even as I barged my way past an elderly couple into the next bubble car and waved frantically through the window at my son’s receding form. Up on the mountain, I stalked the little flocons, tracking my son’s red trousers. What if he fell, lost sight of the guide or slid backwards into the lift machinery?

I’m not proud of this behaviour. I know it’s shameful. I mention it only in the interests of research.

On our flight out I read a blog by the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt in which he outlines the subject of his next book, an attempt to understand why it’s the children of the Anglosphere who are so especially anxious (provisional title: Kids in Space). Back in 2018 Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff published The Coddling of the American Mind, which detailed the crisis facing Gen Z in the USA.