Bring back 1960s-style parenting? Why today's children might actually prefer it – Cameron Wyllie

Of course, it’s easy to sound like a retired Brigadier when you talk about how “lucky” or “entitled” or “fragile” kids are these days – the generalisations roll off the tongue like butter. Memories of one’s own childhood may be rose-tinted, but we look at the youth of today and mostly think how relatively tough our own, long ago, childhood years were.

However, I’m just going to say it, I think we had it pretty good in the 60s and 70s, and I’m not just talking about the music. Some of this is to do with parenting, some with school, and some with external developments, chief among these – obviously – being social media.

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We all have only one childhood

But it’s parenting I want to consider today and the curious thought that crossed my mind recently. I am childless, and I think that parenting must be the hardest thing anyone ever does. What a source of pleasure and pain.

When I was a teacher, I used to be endlessly moved by watching parents with their children – protective, loving, caring, earnest, terrified, sometimes angry with school, teachers, their kids and themselves. For every child, there is only one childhood; how do you make it go right? Where is Dr Spock – American paediatrician – when you need him?

It's a hackneyed claim to say that parenting was tougher back then. I grew up with a gentle, loving dad and a complicated, angry mother who, once in a while, expressed her bitterness by hitting her two (I’d like to think) fairly agreeable children.

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I do not think hitting your children is remotely acceptable but I can see how it happened to me and to countless other kids back then. I did not ever think of my parents as ‘friends’ and, as a teacher, I found it odd at Parents’ Nights when someone said something like “oh, Joe is my best friend” about their son.

It used to make me think about my own best friend and whether I would ever find it necessary to explain why he had to tidy his room, or tell him why he wasn’t going out tomorrow night, or look at his report card and utilise the odd combination of carrot and stick my dad and mum (respectively) used to improve my worrisome school performance.

There were rules, often unspoken, about how things worked in your parents’ household and you lived your life that way. The same was true in school – there were rules and sanctions related to those rules. There was a disciplinary structure and it was administered fairly consistently by saints and sadists alike, those who genuinely liked their pupils and those who only lived to belt them.

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More discipline, more freedom

I don’t believe in corporal punishment in schools either, and I was glad it was abolished – even in the independent sector – just before I started teaching. But practical systems and sanctions in schools often seem to have just disappeared.

However, conversely, I think my generation of children and those who followed on into the 70s and 80s and 90s, had – in so many ways – more freedom. Before I went to school I spent long hours mooching about in our garden playing with the slugs and forming families of woodlice.

When I was eight, during the long, sunny summer holidays we all think we remember, I would just go to the park and be there for hours and hours. I knew when I should go back home and I went. And when I was nine, I would also get on the bus into Edinburgh by myself, a pound note from my grandma in my pocket to buy a couple of singles.

And back when I was six, and placed in the charge of my older brother, big Jimmy Wyllie, ten – not necessarily the most attentive of carers – I got the bus eight miles to Princes St and walked to school.

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Not allowed to get the bus home

It’s now such a performance to get children to and from school – the ‘walking bus’! Cycling with Daddy! And of course, endless, endless, queues of cars carrying children, aged four to 18, across towns and cities so they can (well, at least in theory) learn.

Fifteen-year-olds carry vast expensive rucksacks full of equipment across the Munros of Scotland to get their Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, but aren’t allowed to get the bus home.

So it’s an odd life for lots of young people these days – they aren’t the rule-bound chattels of their parents anymore, but, in truth, they lack autonomy and freedom, living lives made claustrophobic by the constant scrutiny of their peers on Insta and Snap and the tracking device on their phone which tells their mum exactly where they are.

Are they really free to explore, to err, to ‘find themselves’? Is it just the finances that make so many more young people leery of leaving home to go to uni or when they start work?

I’d like to design a reality TV programme where parents, for a month or two, really and truly bring up their kids like they were brought up themselves. And at the end I’d like to ask the young people if they liked it better or worse. And then – only then – would we do the same thing, but in our schools.

Cameron Wyllie is a retired headmaster. He writes a blog called A House in Joppa and hosts the podcast, Two Heads are Better than One, with Rod Grant