Are we facing the worst generation of parents?

Probably not. However, a significant minority of parents may be the most ideologically motivated we have ever seen.

Recently, Sir John Townsley, the CEO of a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT), wrote a brief article on the Telegraph website, claiming that schools are facing the consequences of some unfortunate developments in parenting. The headline described this as “a generation of the worst parents”.

Townsley's description may resonate with some readers. He identifies a minority of parents who have been noticeable since around 2015 and who undermine discipline at every turn. He claims they are unlike previous generations and are determined to resist any attempt to manage the behaviour of their blameless progeny. As he puts it:

Though thankfully they remain a significant minority, the impact of those parents is profound. Theirs is a world in which their children can do no wrong and where their children’s disruptive conduct is defended at every turn. Professionals in schools who seek to challenge that behaviour are attacked. The Special Education Need [sic] and Disabilities Code is mercilessly manipulated in their defence. They attack through formal complaints, Freedom of Information requests and exhausting legal actions.

For Townsley, this group represents the greatest single problem schools now face.

As I'm not a school leader, I don't usually have to deal directly with the parents who are most dedicated to destroying their children's schools. I also remember no shortage of unsupportive parents from other decades. However, Townsley's description certainly reminds me of many of the activist parents on social media who denounce anybody expressing the opinion that children should be held responsible for their behaviour.

Townsley claims that these parents may have been influenced by the permissive approach taken by their own parents. I wonder how much this can really explain. Every generation of parents learns from their own parents, so changes in parenting norms can be amplified in later generations. However, claiming that past changes in parenting led to contemporary changes in parenting leads to an infinite regress.

I would suggest that school leaders should look closer to home when considering the causes of the attitudes displayed by these parents. Many of today's teenagers have parents who attended school in the 2000s. This is the era described in the early posts on my blog. As I explained at the time, schools in the 2000s treated children as essentially blameless. In a post entitled Blamelessness, written in 2008, I described a philosophy based on the idea that children are natural saints. To its adherents, any behaviour which indicates that children have the same, flawed human nature as the rest of us has to be explained away:

…in the absence of more traditional views of human nature in which people are generally disposed to do wrong, it was necessary to come up with imaginative explanations of why children are not responsible for their behaviour, thereby allowing them to be innocent victims even when they are observed to be behaving like complete bastards.

The explanations were:

• Children are too young to understand how to behave.

• Children’s behaviour is determined by their background.

• Badly behaved children have a medical or psychological condition.

It is possible to imagine situations where this is true, but a moment’s thought would tell you that these sorts of situations are obviously rare exceptions to what is usual. But if you were a believer in the inherent innocence or goodness of children then it is impossible for a child to do wrong without some kind of explaining factor, an explaining factor usually picked from this list. Invariably what happens is that normal moral judgement is suspended and the discipline of psychology is bastardised to provide morality-free explanations of children’s behaviour to replace the obvious explanation.

I also explained that those who advocated this philosophy refused to accept that children had any moral agency, yet would not hesitate to pass moral judgements on adults who tried to discipline them. All adult authority was seen as ethically dubious, and those who believed in it were condemned as haters of children.

This philosophy declined in influence (at least in secondary schools) once Ofsted and Local Authorities were no longer enforcing it. Its deficiencies are obvious to classroom teachers, and without pressure from above, it could not be maintained. That’s not to say it has disappeared from schools. The latest version of it is the one in which badly behaved children are described as needing opportunities to “regulate” rather than sanctions. This version is still being preached to teachers on INSET days and promoted by SENDCOs. However, I rarely hear this from secondary headteachers, except those running the very worst schools. I do, however, frequently see dogmatic conviction in the blamelessness of children expressed by online parents who hate the fact that their children are subject to discipline.

It makes me feel quite old to admit it, but, as I mentioned earlier, some of these parents went to school in the 2000s.¹ Their own schooling may have been in a chaotic environment in which sanctions were rare and almost anything could be excused by playing the SEN card. To those parents, secondary schools now, with their clear rules and centralised detention systems, are doing it all wrong. To those parents, schools that don’t allow their children to do what they like are being deliberately cruel. I can’t work out how much this factor is contributing to the current discourse, or even prove it is making a significant contribution. However, the idea is plausible. If it’s true, then until the children of those who attended school in the 2000s have gone through the system, we’ll continue to see a substantial minority of activist parents who oppose reasonable discipline.

1. To be fair, the spread of the 2000s ideology to these parents might not have been through their own schooling. Some of these parents may have acquired these beliefs through the internet. Some may have worked in the education system, perhaps at the time when the belief in blamelessness was at its height. Or they could have worked in part of the education system where that ideology survived, for instance, university education departments.