My wife is delighted by the news, not least because the father of a classmate was present when the art teacher delivered her panegyric. After a late supper, I start sifting through parenting magazines and surfing the Internet, hunting for the right course to nurture our son's gift. The ad that catches my eye promises, "Unlock your child's genius!" My wife wonders if I'm going too far, but her words are no more than background noise to me now.
The next morning, on the walk to school, I float the idea of enrolling in an art course. But my son is having none of it. "I don't want to go to a class and have a teacher tell me what to do – I just want to draw," he says, firmly. "Why do grown-ups have to take over everything?"
The question stops me in my tracks. My son loves to draw. He can spend hours hunched over a piece of paper, inventing alien life forms or sketching Wayne Rooney dribbling a soccer ball. He draws well and it makes him happy. But somehow that is not enough. Part of me wants to harness that happiness, to hone and polish his talent, to turn his art into an achievement.
Pushing your child to the top
Of course, I am not the first parent eager to steer my child to the top. It comes with the territory. Two thousand years ago, a schoolteacher named Lucius Orbilius Pupillus identified pushy parents as an occupational hazard in the classrooms of ancient Rome. When the young Mozart helped make prodigies fashionable in the eighteenth century, many Europeans hothoused their own children in the hope of creating a wunderkind. Today, however, the pressure to make the most of our kids feels all-consuming. We want them to have the best of everything and to be the best at everything. We want them to be artists, academics and athletes, to glide through life without hardship, pain, or failure.
In its more extreme form, this brand of child rearing has different names around the world. Helicopter-parenting – because mom and dad are always hovering overhead. Hyper-parenting. Scandinavians joke about "curling parents" who frantically sweep the ice in front of their child. "Education mothers" devote every waking second to steering their children through the school system in Japan.
Yet parents are not the only ones curling, pushing, and helicoptering. Everybody, from the state to the advertising industry, has designs on childhood. In Britain, a task force of parliamentarians recently warned that too many children dream of growing up to be fairy princesses or soccer stars. Their solution: career advice for five-year-olds.
Wherever you look these days, the message is the same: childhood is too precious to be left to children and children are too precious to be left alone. All this meddling is forging a new kind of childhood. In the past, the Working Child toiled in the fields and, later, in the factories of the Industrial Revolution. The twentieth century saw the rise of the Free-Range Child. Now we have entered the age of the Managed Child.
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Excerpted from Under Pressure by Carl Honoré Copyright © 2008 by Carl Honoré. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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