One advertisement is engraved in my memory for ever. It was, I think, for some ultimate cleaning product. The advertisement showed a child energetically scribbling on the wall, and a mother watching him with stoic serenity and remarking: enjoying yourself, darling?
The translation for the commercially slow: no need to be stressed by the mess, in a moment we will give it a wipe with the revolutionary cleaning product and the wall will recover.
It is not that I have a genetic objection to cleaning products. It is the subtext. The thoroughly dangerous working assumption of consumer culture seeps into us constantly: there is no need to bear any frustration. There is a technological solution to every human ache.
And you know what? It is worse than that. Somebody out there is dripping into us, the parents, the idea that we should be aspiring to a state of permanent happiness, to a life free of malfunctions.
Ratings culture will always emphasise the exceptional case and attempt to grant it normative status. It is interesting, it draws attention, it provokes discussion, it carries viewing figures and raises the price of advertising time. I am not keen on it, but I can understand the logic.
On the other hand, when legislators climb aboard and genuinely propose rewarding prospective parents who take a training course in how not to cause irreversible damage to our children despite being new and potentially irresponsible — that is the moment to cry enough.
The state may be lending a tailwind to a dangerous trend that does not assist parenting but only wounds it.
Here is what the trend actually does, and why I object to it so strongly.
It converts ordinary parental imperfection into a category of risk. Once the frame is damage prevention, every ordinary failure — the lost temper, the missed signal, the bad week — is filed alongside genuine harm, and the parent experiencing it has no way to tell the difference.
The overwhelming majority of parents are not a risk to their children. They are tired people doing something difficult without enough support, who will get a great many things wrong, and whose children will be entirely fine.
Treating that population as though it required supervision does not produce safer children. It produces frightened parents — and a frightened parent is a worse parent, which is precisely the outcome nobody intended.