My son is a wimp. I know this because of a new book by a woman named Hara Estroff Marano, which sounds like something you might serve at a vegan dinner party. In fact, Marano is the editor of Psychology Today, and her book is entitled - you guessed it - A Nation of Wimps: the High Cost of Invasive Parenting.

Photographed on the cover is a boy of about my son's age all wrapped up in bright yellow “Caution” tape and yet looking strangely too much like the villainous Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter films to be truly abject in his wussiness. Still, you get the point: parents these days are overprotective fusspots. Thus an entire generation of young Americans is doomed.

As evidence, Marano cites the case of a mother in Connecticut who sent her three-year-old toddler “to an occupational therapist, two times a week, to work on scissor skills”. If we treat our offspring like this, chides Marano, how will they ever be prepared for the cruelties of a 21st-century adulthood?

She has a point. The little chap with his undeveloped scissor skills will clearly never be able to handle the adult trauma of having to assemble Ikea furniture with a tequila hangover and a wrong-sized Allen key, for example. And Marano has more facts and figures to make her argument. Consider this: in 1968, 17.6 per cent of all American students achieved A grades; in 2004, it was 47.5 per cent. Now some might see this as evidence of the US population becoming wealthier and better educated. Not so, says Marano. It's wimpishness, pure and simple.

Marano's case is rested with this statistical indictment: “Using the classic benchmarks of adulthood - leaving home, finishing school, getting a job, getting married, and having children - 65 per cent of males had reached adulthood by the age of 30 in 1960. By contrast, in 2000, only 31 per cent had.” None of which of course has anything to do with the invention of birth control.

But what if Marano is right? What if a future of wimpdom does indeed await my son and millions of other young Americans like him? Personally, I welcome the development. Given the choice of living in a Nation of Wimps or, say, a Nation of Hard-Bitten Old Bastards, I know which I'd chose. I imagine, for example, that they'd make pretty good cappuccinos in a Nation of Wimps. Same goes for art and music. And let's face it, there wouldn't be much crime in a place where the criminals keep bursting into tears. Meanwhile, the hospitals in this cowardopia would be the best in the world - they'd have to be, given the zero tolerance for pain.

Yes, maybe wimpishness is just what America needs.

Up the creek

Whoever commissions book reviews at The Wall Street Journal clearly has a sense of humour. The job of reviewing A Nation of Wimps was given to a blogger named Tony Woodlief, whose children fit Marano's ultimate definition of wimpishness: they're home-schooled.

“My wife home-schools our four boys because she can accomplish in three hours what [state] schools need six to do poorly,” sniffed Woodlief, in his defence. “Such efficiency gives our sons an extra three hours each day to build forts, go down to the creek in our backyard, or give music recitals at a nursing home.” Woodlief's kids don't sound like wimps to me. They sound like future serial killers

Songs of innocence...

A package arrived on my doorstep the other day from my mum in Northumberland. In it was the 1961 edition of The Oxford Nursery Song Book, from which I used to warble as a child. Which explains a lot, I think. Looking over the lyrics now, it seems I was raised on ditties about homosexual orgies (Three Men in a Tub), animal cruelty (Three Blind Mice), Alzheimer's (There was an Old Woman who Lived in a Shoe), biological terror (Ring a Ring o'Roses), bestiality (There was a Lady Loved a Swine), and good old-fashioned racial ridicule (Taffy was a Welshman). Not to mention the utterly inexplicable Ride a Cock Horse.

...and experience

By the time you read this I will be in Texas to witness the return of 450 or so children to the infamous Yearning for Zion compound, after a spectacular balls-up by the state's department of child protective services who had taken them into care. It's a reminder, I suppose, that not all American children have it easy. Apart from the issue of the girls being “married” at the age of 12, these junior members of the polygamist sect are worked as hard as Dickensian chimney sweeps. And it doesn't seem as if there's a thing anyone can do about it.

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