Every child needs the struggle of adolescence to sort themselves out, to put away childish behaviours. They need space to work things out for themselves, sometimes alone, sometimes with their friends, always supported by the guidance of wise and caring adults in education and at home and in their community.  To waste adolescence is to deny future generations their opportunities to build up the strength and confidence for adult life.  That is a lesson which must be taken seriously by parents as well as teachers. Kate Hippern’s article suggests that young people have come to accept that dependence well into their adult lives.

Watch young men and women, sixth formers and undergraduates, on Deansgate in Manchester on a weekend evening. They have the freedom of money in their pockets as they tumble out of taxis into bars and then weave their way further down the street to a night club. They are free to drink as much as they like and to stay out late. They are dressed in the results of their regular shopping sprees. They are free to make their own friends and have a culture all their own. What they are denied is the freedom to take responsibility for themselves, to make the big decisions, to prepare for adult life.

Freedom without responsibility has serious consequences for democracy and society.  By accompanying their children to open days and interviews, by negotiating for them and “making nurturing an extreme sport” (see Hilpern’s article), parents seem to believe that they are using their experience, ensuring value for money and protecting their offspring from pressures they are not able to cope with.  I wonder if they are also reliving their own golden youth or following dreams of what might have been. One parent I talked to told me “I didn’t go to all the interviews with my daughter, just her visits to the places I would have liked to have studied in, Oxford, Durham and Bristol”. Are parents unwilling to let their children go, to make their own way in the world?  Are they afraid that a precious relationship will not survive the process?  Parents like teachers have come to feel that if they are not controlling, they are not doing their job.

Over-schooling and over-parenting.  Both reflect society’s failure to understand adolescence. There is undoubtedly some resistance to over-parenting says “Kate Hilpern, but, UCAS (the university admissions system), “looks set to pave the way in the opposite direction”. “It is in danger of entrenching even further into our society the message that the next generation are incapable of taking care of themselves or unable to learn from their own mistakes by addressing their own disappointments in life.” She ends  “And that is not fair on them”

Remember that the word “education” is derived from the Latin “educare” meaning “to lead out”, as in the sense of troops being prepared for battle. Education is an evolving process of leading a child out from the security of the home or the classroom through the drilling grounds of early learning, to face its own challenges and be ready for the turmoil of adult life. In just the same way political systems can attempt to discourage people to think for themselves. In 1931 the Pope responded to East Europeans, forbidden to criticise Communism dogma, with the powerful statement of Subsidiarity. “It is wrong for a superior body to hold to itself the right of making decisions which an inferior is already able to make for itself.” Not only was it impossible to stop people thinking for themselves, it was a denial of what they were about, not to let them.

If subsidiarity were to be the ruling principle at home as well as at school, children would be taught how to think responsibly from an early age. They would develop a progression of skills and attitudes which would, as they grew older, put them in charge of their own learning and return them to their natural deep seated urge to be really responsible for themselves. They would grow up. They would know that they did not always need to be told what to do. They would have the dignity and sense of purpose of the craftsman and not be children or students or employees waiting to be given instructions or answerable to someone else.

Like education, parenting has to be a relationship of trust not of control, for if our children are equipped to be able to do something and are then constantly over-ruled or micro-managed, they fast lose motivation together with their sense of lack of control and allow others to be responsible for them. They are denied the opportunity of doing what adolescents do naturally, going beyond their self-imposed limitations and exceeding their parents’ aspirations. We have not equipped them well.

And that is truly not fair on them.

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