Are you signing up your toddlers for Suzuki violin lessons? Supplementing the maths teaching at school with Kumon maths at home? Do you somehow fit the ballet, drama, judo and karate around football and chess club? The great news is: the latest research says this will all make your children do better in school! Well, it might or it might not. It will certainly turn them into exhausted, regimented automatons, so used to taking instruction that they would walk blindly off a cliff if their ballet teacher told them to. It will stunt their imaginations, leave them no time to themselves and teach them nothing about how to cope with boredom.
I do wish that middle-class parents would stop trying to maximise their children. Our offspring don’t have to be Grade 8 violinists or county athletics champions or black-belt karate kids. Why can’t they just have fun? Our two have done very little outside school. One did a bit of drama, the other a bit of ballet, at primary school. There was some desultory karate for a year or two. And, while each briefly took up an instrument, neither showed any interest or enthusiasm, let alone practised, so their saxophone and guitar now gather dust, ready for me and my husband to become middle-aged rockers one day when we have more time to spare. That’s it, really.
And they seem none the worse for it. If either had shown real passion for an extracurricular activity, I would happily have gone along with it. But they didn’t. And we have actively encouraged them not to get into any sports teams so we don’t all have to trek off to other schools on Saturday afternoons. Luckily, neither shows much sporting talent, either, so that’s a relief.
Certain pursuits are very difficult to pick up as an adult, and these are worth learning when young. Playing an instrument is one; skiing (if you can afford it) is another. But it is pointless to push children where they don’t want to go. If ours regret, as adults, that they didn’t stick to their sax or guitar lessons, I shall simply say, “More fool you!” Yet more ambitious parents pore over each piece of research, trying to determine what will maximise their children’s chances of getting into the top schools, earning the top exam results, sailing into Oxford or Cambridge and thence to a top merchant bank. They are happy to play Mozart to their foetuses or hold showcards above their babies’ cots if that is what it takes. It makes me want to weep.
A child’s chances of success in life are determined mainly by its innate ability. There is not much you can do about that. Mozarts are born, not made. A certain amount of application helps, particularly in secondary school. Beyond that, a happy, loving and accepting family providing emotional stability is about all that a parent can offer.
And you have to wonder: do all these hothoused children really want to be stars, or is it their parents who want them to be? Even if the children claim to nurture a burning ambition, it is probably because they have sublimated their parents’ burning ambition for them. Perhaps they believe that their parents’ love is conditional on achievement, in which case they will be terrified of failure and are likely to be dangerously emotionally vulnerable to setbacks in life.
This is hardly going to lead to the emotional resilience that most parents think they would like to imbue in their children. Yet I suspect that the “maximising” parents have little idea of how damaging their behaviour is. They rationalise it by saying that they want the best for their children. In fact, it is more likely that they want the best for themselves.
Just as some men look for trophy wives, so some mothers want to turn their offspring into trophy children. A high-achieving child reflects well on them. They can boast about the music grades, the karate belts, the exam results. They can compete with the other mums outside the school gates.
Perhaps they have left jobs in which maximising was the prime goal. They were trying to maximise their company’s profits or the return on the money they invested for clients. And they are now channelling the same maximising zeal into their children.
But in a human context the philosophy of maximisation does not work well. Yes, you can throw all the time and energy you possess into becoming a world-class athlete or musician, but you have to have extraordinary talent in the first place and it distorts your life horribly. Workaholics may achieve a lot in the office, but the career success is likely to be at the expense of personal and family relationships.
We do our children far more good if we encourage balance and moderation. Don’t become an obsessive but, equally, don’t idle your life away. Pursue what you enjoy, do enough schoolwork to achieve goals that are realistic for you. Be happy. That’s enough.
Isn’t it?
Master of the mot juste
Two friends and contemporaries of mine at Oxford published their first fiction within a year of each other in the early 1990s. Will Self quickly became a widely read and much talked-about novelist, columnist and television pundit. Edward St Aubyn remained obscure and unappreciated.
Yet I always preferred St Aubyn’s writing. Self’s — though sometimes brilliantly inventive — can also be rambling and full of showily arcane words. St Aubyn’s books are so precise and crystalline that not a sentence needs editing. Like a finely cut diamond, they shimmer with clarity, comedy and poignancy.
At last, St Aubyn’s talent has been recognised. He didn’t win the Man Booker prize this week but his latest book, Mother’s Milk, made it to the shortlist and is now No 33 on Amazon’s sales list. Not before time, I say.
Hot gossip
I have been in a bit of a running spat with Peter McKay, editor of the Daily Mail’s Ephraim Hardcastle column (gobbets of gossip and invective) for some years. Or at least, he has been in a running spat with me, since I usually let the pieces pass with no comment. What’s the point? Last week, however, he wrote something that was so baldly and blatantly wrong that I sent him a brief e-mail to put the record straight. Why his reply was captured by our spam quarantine system, I really can’t think.
What could possibly be offensive in a missive from the Daily Mail?
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
