27-02-2025
Parenting books aren't the solution, they're actually the problem
I tend to agree with Katherine Birbalsingh's analysis of the ineffectual modern parent – not least because I lack authority myself, and would prefer to blame it on a cultural phenomenon.
The woman best known as Britain's strictest head teacher says parents have lost 'dominion' over our children, because of a change in the literature and psychology of child-rearing.
'If you're looking for books to give you advice on what to do as a parent, it's almost impossible to access the kind of advice you would have gotten 50, 60 years ago,' says Birbalsingh. 'The stuff you'll get nowadays will be much more along the lines of gentle parenting, being friends with your children, not holding them to account.'
A quick glance at Amazon's childcare section – There's No Such Thing as Naughty; The Patient Parent; Parenting Without Anger; The Gentle Parenting Book – seems to confirm this diagnosis.
But even more striking than the tone of these books is their number. There are currently more than 60,000 parenting books listed on Amazon's UK site. Add to that the cacophony of online parenting advice – the websites, apps, forums and social media influencers – and what you have is a psychological Babel.
This, it seems to me, is the real cultural difference between my parents' generation and mine. They could still hear themselves think.
There was only one notable parenting guru around during my own babyhood: Dr Spock. (He was on the soft side. Not the disciplinarian of Birbalsingh's nostalgic thesis.) The idea that parenting was a complex mission requiring specialist knowledge had not yet fully caught on.
My mother tells me she never read a single parenting book. 'I just listened to your grandmothers. And then I ignored them.'
By contrast, I read voraciously; it seemed negligent not to, with so much information out there.
My parenting style flapped around like a windsock in a hurricane, as one childcare guru superseded another. Every change of direction eroded what little confidence I had in my own instincts; and this, in turn, kept me scurrying back to the bookshelf in search of guidance.
I ended up – as I remain – confused, irresolute and inconsistent. Not just from reading the wrong books, but from reading any at all.
Social media algorithms
There are, it should be said, some benefits to the friendly model of contemporary parenting. My children confide in me with welcome frankness, and in doing so often reveal hidden aspects of their own culture.
My eldest boy, for example, tells me that every few weeks he resets his Instagram algorithm by searching for cute wombats, funny pandas and other 'middle-aged mum stuff'. He has to do this, or his timeline becomes over-run with neo-Nazis.
The algorithm wants to serve him far-Right content because he is a) a teenage boy, and b) a fan of mixed martial arts (MMA). For reasons that I don't fully understand, but he does, there's an ideological pipeline that runs from MMA to Donald Trump to the white supremacist sub-culture of so-called Active Clubs, which revere Hitler and were closely involved in the rioting that followed the Southport murders.
An algorithm is a curiously blunt instrument, even now. It cannot understand that a boy who is interested in fighting might also be gentle, philosophical, politically moderate. Despite having access to all his data, it can't actually see my son at all. Only the pigeonhole into which it keeps trying to usher him.
