Bringing up baby

For my 19-month-old son Santo, living in Rome meant that a typical morning went something like this: get up, get dressed, get hoisted up and down by a hydraulic car lift in our local garage (the mechanic Paolo was one of his good friends), stop for a sugary cornetto for breakfast, help the barman make a café for Mama, sit on a random selection of parked motorini (motorbikes), hang out at our friend Emiliano’s alimentari sticking grubby hands on legs of prosciutto while being fed hunks of parmigiano, get kissed passionately by a wide variety of complete strangers.

I am fairly certain that this is not the routine spoonfed to increasingly fear-driven parents by modern British childcare experts. In fact, it would probably have had me cautioned by child-protection services in this country. For a strange thing has occurred. Somewhere in the past 15 years, the Brits have become more neurotic than Italians, the most child-centric race on the planet, when it comes to raising their offspring. Overtaking a nation that can spend an entire three-hour meal dissecting (verbally, not physically) the bowel movements of a ten-month-old family member is no mean feat. Yet somehow the pressure and competition in this country to raise perfect offspring has created a new, rather odd, and inherently unBritish culture of obsessive parenting.

I recently moved to London from southern Italy, toddler in tow, and as a newcomer to this phenomenon, I felt like a member of the Navi tribe standing in my local playground for the first time. Whatever happened to the good old days when British parents packed their kids off to boarding school at seven and didn’t pretend to like them more than the dogs? This generation micromanages its offspring and their day-to-day progress like overseers of a much longed-for house extension. And, like a property upgrade, it seems to involve throwing a great deal of money at ‘the problem’.