Too many teardrops

Moral panic is the right reaction: we are afraid of our young

Theodore Dalrymple

1 September 2007

True grief is often swamped by the mawkishness of strangers

Let me here offer a few observations about contemporary British childhood and parenting, as I have observed them in a British slum, that may or may not be connected with Rhys Jones’s murder. The first is that children are increasingly the customers of their parents, who regard the provision of gewgaws as the whole duty of parenthood. I have been asked by parents many times why a child should have turned out so horrible when they, the parents, gave him everything, from trainers with lights in their heels to a television in his bedroom. The second is that, thanks to the rise of mass self-importance, and the fact that their children are the extension of themselves, parents regard their children as being inherently beyond reproach and will, for example, take the side of their children in any disciplinary dispute with a teacher or other person in authority. This is linked to the reversal of the direction of moral authority, from adult to child. The word pupil is hardly ever used any more, having given way to student: children as young as three or four are often called students. Mothers ask their children what they want to eat for their next meal, what they want to do next, or what they want to watch on television, with the natural consequence that they, the children, come to regard their own whim as law, which in turn results in an inflamed frustration at the intractability of the world which does not entirely agree with them.

Finally, parents are appalled to discover that their children are not as cuddly or as easy to get along with as teddy bears. They come to hate them, and by the time they have finished bringing them up, by the age of seven or eight, they are right to do so.

So we have become a nation afraid of our own young, as the Eloi in The Time Machine were afraid of the Morlocks. That is the meaning of omerta in Britain.