Yesterday, with great fanfare, the results of The Good Childhood Inquiry were published. Knowing you, you probably read all about it. But let's just say, for a moment, that you didn't. I will provide a brutal summary. Not at all, all part of the service.

The inquiry concluded that children in Britain are unhappy. This is largely caused by the behaviour of their parents, especially working women. And this damaging behaviour results from the social evil of excessive individualism. There were a couple of hundred more pages, but that just about does it.

Here is an equally brutal summary of my response. Children in this country are not unhappy. The inquiry presents no convincing evidence at all that children are being damaged by the behaviour of their parents or by women working. There is no reason to believe that our individualism is excessive or a social evil. And even if it were, it is impossible to divine what might connect individualism to the happiness of children or the behaviour of parents.

Apart from that, I thought the report was terrific.

Let's kick off with a little quiz. In 2006 the British Household Panel Survey asked a sample of 11 to 16-year-olds if they were happy. They were given a range of choices from “completely happy” to “completely unhappy” and asked “which best describes how you feel about your life as a whole?” Your starter for 10. What proportion described themselves as being completely unhappy? The answer is 1 per cent. And now your bonus question. What was the total proportion who chose a description suggesting that they were even a little unhappy? Time's up: 4per cent is the figure you were looking for.

Now you might think that this was an obscure finding that had not come to the attention of the inquiry. Except for this. I found the panel survey statistic on page 8 of the inquiry report. The authors cite it and move smoothly on, as if they hadn't. I suppose a report on “Why, oh why, is everything going so badly right?” might not have made the ten o'clock news.

Let's keep going. The central contention of the report is that children are shaped and in many cases badly damaged by the self-indulgent behaviour of their parents. Quite early on it states that “the style of parenting that is loving and yet firm - now known in the jargon as authoritative - is the most effective in terms of children's outcomes and wellbeing”. And to be fair to the authors, there is some research that seems to suggest that this is, indeed, the case.

There is, however, a problem with this research. In fact, two big problems. The first is simple - genes. We all know - and even if we didn't, studies have shown beyond doubt - that we don't just inherit our nose and our mouth from our parents. We also inherit many of the ways in which we behave. Naturally, it isn't true that we all behave exactly like our parents in every respect. I am not going anywhere near as far as that. But we are certainly born with a vastly increased tendency to behave in certain ways, as a result of the genes passed on to us.

So if parents are loving and firm and have children with better “outcomes” (to use the inquiry's phrase) it may not be the loving and firm parenting style that causes the better outcome. It may just be that people who themselves have a tendency to parent in a sensible, mature fashion tend to produce children with genes that help them to be sensible and mature.

Studies suggesting that parenting style influences the way children turn out do not properly adjust for genetic differences. They do not, for instance, look at identical twins brought up by different parents.

This leads on to the second flaw in the research. As any parent will agree, it is much easier to be “authoritative” when interacting with a co-operative, compliant child. Thus authoritative parents and successful children might tend to be found in pairs. The inquiry assumes that the successful child is produced by the impressive parenting. In reality, however, it may be that it is the impressive parenting that is produced by the successful child.

As for the suggestion that working mothers are damaging their children, the studies in the report do not show this in any clear or convincing way.

We all have a strong instinct that our children are shaped by what we do to them. We want to believe this, because we don't want to feel that we are wasting our time. And even if we didn't have this feeling, we can see that our children are quite like us and guess that it is because they are copying our behaviour.

All this is understandable, but the evidence for it is quite weak. Of course our children are like us: that is because they are our children, genetically ours. And of course the way we behave towards our children makes an impact on the way they behave to us.

But that isn't the same as saying that it has an impact on the way they behave towards others or the way they turn out.

Then finally, there is the attack on individualism. Reading the report I was at a loss to know exactly what excessive individualism had to do with it. I think it is just something that the authors don't like, so they thought they would toss it in there.

Perhaps then, I might finish by putting in a word for modern individualism. We are social animals because, as we evolved, reciprocating favours from others in our community assisted our survival and the passing down of our genes. We learn to pick out those who we think will return our favours, and therefore have a strong sense of who we regard as a friend.

The trouble is that our instinct leads us to regard others as foe. The very same natural propensity to be communal and socially cohesive, makes us aggressive to outsiders. It has created pogroms, civil strife, war.

In recent years we have become more civilised. The group that we regard as like us, as a friend, as liable to reciprocate our favours, has grown enormously. The free market and modern technology have helped. This has weakened the bond we feel with our immediate community and we see ourselves more as individuals. Social relations have become shallower, but our network wider. We have lost through this, but we have also gained. We fight fewer wars, we kill each other less often, we treat minorities much better, we are less aggressive to outsiders.

Doubtless we have become more individualistic and some individuals too selfish. But look at the strife in the world. Look at the Middle East, or Congo, or Somalia. Indeed look at Lincolnshire, where they are out striking against “the Eyeties”. Is it really the case that our biggest social problem is excessive individualism?

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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