I actively contribute to the decline and collapse of the West and our civilisation. This realization dawned on me last week as I stood behind a French Alps turnstile and watched my little boy, who was on the other side, take a bubble lift up the mountain to the nursery slope. He was surrounded by children and safe with an instructor from French Ski School, ESF. He’s just turned seven, yet I behaved like a distressed cow watching her calf hauled off to market. I weaved and bent to keep him within my sight, but he was too far away. He stared at me with mad, staring eyes as I craned over the barrier. My son’s class was les floconsThe snowflakes were printed on each child’s yellow bib. Some small part of me recognised how comically fitting that snowflake was, even as I barged my way past an elderly couple into the next bubble car and waved frantically through the window at my son’s receding form. I stalked the little one up on the mountain. flocons, tracking my son’s red trousers. What if my son falls, loses sight of the guide, or slides backwards into lift machinery?
Why is it that those of us who were independent and resilient as children are denying our children the freedoms we cherish?
I’m not proud of this behaviour. I know it’s shameful. It’s not something I would recommend to anyone.
On our flight out I read a blog by the American psychologist Jonathan Haidt in which he outlines the subject of his next book, an attempt to understand why it’s the children of the Anglosphere who are so especially anxious (provisional title: Kids in Space). Haidt, along with his co-author Greg Lukianoff, published the book in 2018. The American Mind: CoddlingThe article outlined the current crisis facing Gen Z in America. The trouble with the kids, explained Haidt and Lukianoff, is that they’ve come to believe three great untruths. They are fragile and easily injured, which is the first untruth. This is why they think ‘misgendering’ and ‘micro-aggressions’ cause actual harm. The second is that their own feelings are a reasonable guide to reality, and the third is that life is a constant struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor, good and evil – hence the popular notion that anyone in power is a scumbag and all minorities are pure as the driven snow.
You can see these lies in action by watching the video taken a few days ago. It shows student activists shouting abuse at Riley Gaines (a female American swimmer). The fact that Riley even holds the view that trans women should not compete in women’s sports is so overwhelming to the kids that they ululate and shriek like the survivors of a massacre.
Haidt’s new thesis, based on data from surveys and from our health services, is that this emotional fragility stretches particularly across the English-speaking world: America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. He blames smartphones – not screen-time per se but the fact that screens have displaced other healthier activities – and he blames parents. If the Anglosphere is producing snowflakes, it’s because mothers like me have bred them. British parents are different – more coddling than other Europeans, he thinks – and my week in the Alps only goes to show he’s right.
As I took the bubble lift back down into the valley I thought of a parenting book given to me by a good friend when I was pregnant – the only one I’ve ever read or felt the need to. It’s by an American, Pamela Druckerman, who moved from the US to Paris with her daughter, and it describes how extremely and amusingly self-possessed French children are, relative to their American peers, and how little their parents micromanage them. French Children Don’t Throw Food, it’s called. One should write another: French Ski Guides Don’t Look Back. I noticed during the week that the men and women of the ESF don’t fuss and chivvy, they don’t obsessively count their little charges or tick them off a list, they simply lead from the front and trust the flocons To bob along with them. It’s extraordinary to English eyes. Perhaps French parents don’t sue? But then, nor do they catch the next bubble lift so as to show their child they’re not alone, or beat on the plexiglass like Dustin Hoffman in the final scenes of The Graduate. They simply kiss their three-yearolds goodbye and then go. Because they believe their children will take care of their own needs, they are mostly successful.
A while ago I signed up to Haidt’s Let Grow project, which asks panicky western parents to make a pledge to give their kids some freedom. ‘We make a commitment to step back! We will allow some frustration and imperfection!’ Since I made that promise, I now realise, the only parenting resolution I’ve really kept is to make sure that there’s an Apple airtag tucked in my son’s trouser pocket whenever he’s off on a trip. I can vaguely recall thinking it was creepy to secretly monitor a child. It seems reasonable to me now.
This paranoid parenting style is encouraged in America, Britain, and Australia. Why is it that those of us who have grown up independent and resilient refuse to give our kids the freedom we value so highly? I’m looking forward to the answers Haidt provides, and all I can advise him is that it’s going to take more than a parent pledge to save future generations. We snowflake-makers are adept at deceitful self-deception.
Day two of ESF was my second day. I had resolved to be more French and felt disgraced. I was determined to be more French as I continued following the ESF instructions. flocons up in the bubble once more, I realised I’d left my pass behind. The turnstile wouldn’t turn. Did I let go? I didn’t. I was overcome by the vision of my son at the top, waiting for me like Grey-friars Bobby. I refused to let go until he appeared. So I waited until the lift operator’s back was turned, and jumped the barrier. At the top, heart pounding, I leapt from the lift just in time to see him rounding the corner, hard up on the teacher’s heels, not looking back.
