Suzanne Harrington: As parents, we should allow our kids to fail and pick themselves up again

Today, parenting culture has become something altogether more co-dependent. Instead of it being a straightforward one-way dependence — your kid depends on you to stay alive

Suzanne Harrington: "Let us try, then, to be more submarine. To lurk in the background unseen, ready to break cover only when needed." Picture: Andrew Dunsmore.

In Graydon Carter’s cracking memoir, When The Going Was Good — about the mad excesses of journalism before the money ran out — the former Vanity Fair editor describes growing up in 1950s suburban Canada.

“Childhood was not the spectator sport is it today,” he writes, adding that “50s-era parents were largely submarine parents: there, but not really in evidence”.