Stop spoiling our children and teach them the right values

I should be wary about writing this column for two reasons, at least.

Firstly, and most regrettably, I have no children of my own. And, as a wise grandmother in Cashel warned me many years ago, it is strange how childless people always know the most — and shout the loudest — about parenting.

(You are quite right, she would not have used that word — it would have been ‘bringing up children’).

Secondly, people of a certain age have grumbled about declining standards among younger generations since Socrates. And his comments suggest that, on this topic, even that wise man was motivated more by envy for youthful vigour than by dispassionate insight.

Nevertheless, I can’t quite contain myself. And I am not so much moaning about younger generations, as wondering why my own contemporaries so often feel that they have to buy the love of their offspring with conspicuous consumer goods, and pay their way for young adults long after they should be looking after themselves.

I recently heard about a young man — well, he was in his 30s actually — whose father was still paying fees for architectural courses in which he never quite qualified. Not even after he married (in Rome) did this young man feel particularly moved to get a full-time job.

Why would he, when his in-laws had paid for the wedding, and bought the happy couple a nice house in the west?

As far as I know, he is not a lazy person. People who have employed him in various short-term capacities praise his commitment, even his initiative.

But he soon moves on, because he knows there is always a safety net while he waits for his dream job to come around.

And his social life is too exciting to give him much time to study, the one thing that might actually put a dream job within his grasp.

Or consider this: a young woman, from a working class background, writes off two cars in three years. She is a little younger than the young man I mentioned, but plenty old enough to buy a car for herself. And then she would probably keep it on the road, and stop endangering herself — and other people — with reckless driving. But her hard-working father just shrugs and buys her another one, second hand but serviceable, every time she has an argument with a wall.

Where has it come from, and why, this compulsion at all levels of our society to treat offspring as though they could not fend for themselves? And it’s not as if this started with the current crisis, when younger people might certainly need a shelter from time to time, as the economy older people built so shoddily falls on all our heads.

But no, it started off when the boom was bada-blinging away, like a troupe of Tony Soprano’s lap-dancers, and high-paying jobs were low-hanging fruit that anyone who made a half-stretch could grasp with ease.

Perhaps the boom did encourage parents to dig deeper in a kind of half-prescient panic when they saw the prices of houses shooting up beyond even the most inflated reach of their children’s incomes.

They started remortgaging their own homes to buy a two-bedroomed box a hundred miles’ commute away for Sean and Saoirse.

The idea of parents, other than the very rich, buying homes for their children certainly seems novel to me, at least in Ireland. I do remember noticing that Spanish and Italian families tended to do this many years ago. Even people with very modest incomes, who voted for the Communist Party, could not wait to set their little darlings up with private property of some sort. I’ve never understood how they could afford it. Whether it strengthened family ties or weakened the work ethic I just don’t know.

But I do know that it was never part of our culture here. When you got your first job, whether it was full-time, or part-time while still at school, you gave your folks some of your wages. That applied always when you lived at home, and sometimes even if you didn’t. If you were lucky enough to go to college, you still took jobs, almost automatically, at least to pay for your exotic travels on those endless summers off.

Some people actually paid their own college fees, out of savings from canning peas in Peterborough, or working double shifts in a bar in Nantucket, plus a night shift through the year at home. I’m sure — well, I hope — that some still do. I’m afraid I didn’t, much of the time.

But when I took a ‘sabbatical’ — really a yearlong break from all that sweating over hot novels — I did somehow finance all my own trips. Whether it was Berlin, to check out the most revolutionary city in Europe at the time (1973), or the rather different delights of Chaouen in Morocco, I paid my own way. Filling shelves on an Aldi Market in Germany, picking grapes in France, whatever it took. And I left home early on, and paid my most of my own rent while at college, and all of it after I left.

There was nothing exceptional about this. Like many people in my generation, I thought capitalism was on its last legs, about to be swept away by a utopian socialist paradise. But we still felt we had to support ourselves financially. And I am glad we did, because it prepared us for the harsh realities of a capitalist world that never collapsed, but just grew and grew and grew.

However, waxing nostalgic about the way we were hardly answers my own question — why do so many sane adults feel compelled to give huge presents to their children, and to continue this practice until long after their children have children themselves?

We were no more virtuous in your youth than twenty- or thirtysomethings are today. Nor does it seem likely that our parents were innately wiser than we grew up to be. But two huge changes occurred, that have turned the joy of gift-giving into a monstrous nightmare

Capitalism always needs new markets, and since the 1950s it has found one in teenagers, and then another in children. It started with blue jeans and ‘45’s — remember them? Today it is cars, houses, spray tans for First Communions and Playboy bras for six-year-old girls.

Coupled with this, parents have felt obliged to work longer and longer hours outside the home. They have to keep trying to fill the ever-growing list of consumer goods dictated as ‘essentials’ by increasingly omnipresent advertising. Sisyphus had it easy by comparison.

It’s not an original thought, but it may be a true one: perhaps this recession will teach us to recover some sense of what is really important in life. Don’t rush to buy the young person in your life a car, even if you can afford to. Take them on a walk to your favourite place in the woods, or show them how to fix an engine. Odds are, they will remember these experiences in 50 years time, long after they have forgotten this year’s Mini-Cooper.