There was a review in Saturday’s Guardian of a book by a philosopher who disputes the new authoritarianism with regards to childrearing. (Sorry, I’ve thrown it out, I can’t check his name or the name of the author of the article)

However, to the best of my recollection (which the evidence above shows to be possibly faulty) he was taking issue with the supernanny style of bringing up children. I  certainly do so myself, in the strongest of terms. There is clearly a return to 1930s (Truby King et al)  ideas about bringing up babies.  Even worse, now that both parents almost always have to go to work, most toddlers barely see an adult who isn’t paid to care for them, for more than an hour or two a day. If that adult is held in thrall by the emotionally crippling theories of the day, the baby might as well be in an orphanage.

The whole supernanny style approach is based on the belief that professionals are better than inept parents at looking after kids. That’s obviously why kids in care do so well then, is it?

Biological determination holds the centre stage in well nigh every other social theory nowadays.  So why are genetics and mammalian biology miraculously absent from our beliefs about childcare.  Mothers and babies are supposed to dispense with their instincts and pay attention to wherever the childcare pendulum has swung today. And the childcare pendulum is rapidly advancing in the direction of authoritarianism, without even the belief in a shared social project that might have mitigated the 1930s approach. This approach made a generation of parents and babies infinitely miserable – the babies because they were forced to conform to unnatural rules at a pace they did not choose; the parents because they could never live up to the expression of hatred implicit in these rules, unless they genuinely hated their kids. 

The only saving grace was that real people sneakily behaved as human beings in the face of the rules.  What a mercy human fallibility can be.

Current thinking seems to be – Put your baby in a nursery and go to work to buy more and more consumer goods.  Put your school child through endless standard tests that value and enforce mediocrity.  Pressurise your kids from the moment of birth or they will fall behind in the league tables of life. When your offspring  becomes a demanding consumerist nightmare child, who prefers products to genuine attention, who would have expected that?