And then your child will be twenty-four, and a smooth operator will sell him a dubious deal and sting him for thousands, and the day after that he will pick up a hitchhiker without knowing what he is walking into, and lose the car, and then his landlord will throw him onto the street, and then he will knock at your door on a rainy night and you will open it and see him, wretched and wet and sad — and then you will clutch your head in both hands and cry out: why did I wrap him in cotton wool all this time instead of preparing him for real life?
Dear parent, hand on heart: have you ever found yourself running a horror scenario like that in your head?
If you answered yes, note the following three conclusions. First, countless parents are running that exact scenario at this very moment. Second, you are entirely normal. Third, you may have fallen victim to the myth of preparation for the real world.
Where exactly is the real world?
A dusty street in a small town. A pastoral village in the north. A noisy factory. A mid-sized branch of a bank. A designer technology campus. A football pitch on a Saturday. A busy high street.
This country contains at least three hundred and ninety-four real worlds and roughly seven hundred different life situations, each with its own regularities and its own hidden rules of operation — and that is before we mention the different types of people who populate each of them.
The infinite variety of human experience leads me to one applicable conclusion. The only real world genuinely relevant to a child, and within which he must develop proper coping skills, is his own here and now.
The questions that should occupy him, and us, right now relate to the conflicts genuinely burning in his small life. How do you enjoy the sandpit without getting that irritating sand in your eyes? What do you do when the person you were playing with yesterday will not play today?
Those are not preparation for real life. They are real life, at the scale he currently inhabits — and every capacity he will need at twenty-four is being built in them, or is not.
Which is the actual answer to the horror scenario, and it is more reassuring than it sounds. You cannot toughen a child in advance against a situation neither of you can imagine. What you can do is let him handle the difficulties that are actually in front of him, at six and at nine and at fourteen, rather than removing them.
That is the whole of the preparation, and it looks nothing like hardship. It looks like standing slightly further back than is comfortable, repeatedly, for eighteen years.