The dogma of ‘Britain's Strictest Headmistress' is a con as old as time - gentle parenting produces happier kids

The Guardian

01-03-2025

You've heard the ­terrible news, I'm sure. Our children are pampered. We raise the coddled brats not as stern parents but simpering friends. We flatter their whims and let them bury their heads in screens. We fetishise what they feel, care not for what they learn, and neglect what they need: that good old-fashioned commonsense discipline that raised the great generations of times past.
Inarguably the greatest peddler of this diagnosis is Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain's Strictest Headmistress™ and co-founder of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, which boasts fastidious adherence to uniforms, timed loo breaks and silent corridors. In an interview with the Times last week, she yet again bemoaned the '­gentle parenting' that is leaving her students ill-equipped for modern life.
Her approach is hardly new in modern times. Amy Chua's 2011 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, preached stern, academically focused parenting, in which withholding compliments, denying playdates and banning sleepovers were the order of the day. It was a sensation at the time (and, in fact, so influential to this cohort that Michaela would release a book entitled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers two years later).
In the time since, these age-old woes have been joined by constant panics over smartphones, tablets and screen time, perhaps best represented by Jonathan Haidt's 2024 tome The Anxious Generation, which posits that allowing our children to avail themselves of the technology that powers our lives has spawned an epidemic of mental illness that we must do all we can to forestall.
At this juncture, I'll admit I'm not convinced. In the case of Birbalsingh, I find her pronouncements to be boilerplate conservatism rebadged as revolutionary pedagogy, complete with consistent, and tired, ­jeremiads against 'woke culture' and 'Marxist' education ministers.
Michaela's academic results are indeed excellent, but so are those of many other schools that do not subscribe to its philosophy, and the web of factors that inform how schools perform is complex. As for how their students are parented at home – the most common crux of Birbalsingh's pronouncements – we, quite rightly, have no idea, despite her constant endeavours to sow the airwaves with charming anecdotes about how feckless and stupid they often are.
In the case of Chua, the available research counters her claims quite starkly. A 2013 paper by Su Yeong Kim at the University of Texas at Austin found that children of tiger parents were 'more likely than those with supportive or easygoing parents to feel more alienated from their parents, report greater depressive symptoms, and, in contrast to the stereotype of high achievement, report lower GPAs [grade point averages]'.
Haidt's thesis that smartphones and social media use are ­turning our children into depressive zombies sounds ­convincing until one considers the correlative fallacy in connecting increased smartphone use to rising diagnoses of mental ill health. When I recall the entirely unaddressed mental wellbeing of classmates during my own pre-smartphone schooling, I can freely imagine that diagnosis and treatment had a lot of catching up to do. Consider, also, the consistent refrain that British kids are falling behind in coding, and that touchy feely subjects like arts and languages should make way for computing classes for every child in Britain. How, precisely, we achieve this ­without screens is left for brighter minds than ours to figure out.
If I sound glib about all these Cassandras, perhaps it's because I'm sick of the tired grift that rewards them for passing off alarmist hectoring as common sense. My own generation of parents – the timid, indulgent, millennials they so despise – are, ourselves, the 'terror tots' of the 80s and 90s, raised on a diet of ultraviolent computer games and video nasties; the very same tykes the press insisted would grow up to be remorseless, vacant serial killers. Were I to sit with those currently stigmatising parental indulgence and yearning for the return of cold, hard discipline, I'd have little problem discerning which generation had trended toward psychopathy in the intervening years.
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Just about the only thing we can say with any certainty is that strictures of discipline, education and access to technology, affect different children in different ways. A greater awareness of their individual needs is warranted, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach aimed at scaring parents and flattering the culture war zealots who consider every new thing strange and every kindness wicked. Children are, it turns out, frustratingly ­individual. In this sense, one might almost compare them to human beings.
Anyone still doing the 'kids these days' routine in 2025 is engaged in a con as old as time. You've possibly encountered an old quote that often does the rounds. 'We have fallen upon evil times. The world has waxed very old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their parents.' It's often attributed to King Naram, who ruled the Akkadian empire from approximately 2255–2218 BC, with the humorous implication that people have been saying these kinds of things for millennia. In actual fact, no useful source for it stretches back further than 1913.
As such, we don't know if a Mesopotamian king wrote those words more than four millennia ago, but we do know that we've been mocking our peers for echoing these scaremongering, solipsistic sentiments for a century at least.
Call me old-fashioned, but this is a tradition I reckon we should uphold.