Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety | 4 July 2009

‘Hyper-parenting’ may be bad — but look what happened when I tried the alternative

issue 04 July 2009

‘Hyper-parenting’ may be bad — but look what happened when I tried the alternative

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Father’s Day piece that described a typical Sunday in my life. Essentially, it involved being an indentured slave to my four young children. Several people pointed out that I was guilty of ‘helicopter parenting’ — an American term for supervising your children’s lives too closely — and recommended a book on the subject by Carl Honoré, a Canadian intellectual.

I was a bit suspicious because Honoré is one of the leading advocates of the Slow Movement, but Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting is quite convincing. According to Honoré, we have entered the age of the ‘managed child’ in which middle-class parents spend too much time meddling in their children’s lives. ‘The average distance from home British kids are permitted to wander by themselves has fallen nearly 90 per cent since the 1970s,’ he points out.

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