There are many parenting styles for teenagers, but sometimes it feels like there are just two: cool and uncool. Often, cool, liberal parents are lovely: just trying to let their kids breathe. Then you get the other kind, doing the “cool parent” thing. The ones who are smug and tiring. Who make you feel fogeyish and hysterical about raising concerns (their attitude: “What’s the weather like in Daily Mail land?”). The ones who often seem misinformed and out of date. They are many things, but I’ve come to think they can also be dangerous.
Cool parents are out in force right now. The uncool ones too: the anxious and alert. The TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp is in the news for letting her 15-year-old son go Interrailing with a friend, prompting a discussion about children and parental permissions.
Meanwhile, while we’re still kohl-deep in “Brat summer”, along comes the post-GCSE/A-level party season. It’s been evident for a while that, just as American kids have spring break, British children have branded the post-exam period summer break – their thing, their moment, whether parents like it or not.
Off they rock to parties and music festivals (Reading, Leeds, et al), getting up to all sorts. And the cool parent mantra starts up. Just like we did, right? Don’t be hypocrites. Don’t be killjoys. Stop catastrophising. Well, quite. And you could agree, to an extent. Worrying about your kids could feel akin to parental karma – payback for your own youthful excesses. At the same time, it’s starting to feel much more complicated than that.
Teenage/young adulthood is the true “red zone” of parenting. Babies keep you awake and crap like tiny cattle. But babies don’t get trampled in festival crowds or spiked in nightclubs. Nor is there an attendant parenting culture pressuring you to back off, butt out and stay shtum.
This is part of the difficulty of youth hedonism. It’s not just about the generation of kids; it’s also about the generation of parents. How the protective, controlling, “helicoptering” style now embedded in the UK is incompatible with heightened freedoms. It’s also about different generational styles of hedonism. Is your child’s partying equivalent to your own youthful wild times? Is it really the same Out There?
Catastrophising never helps, but let’s be clear-eyed about dangers facing young people. Stabbings, rapes, assaults, spiking (not just of drinks but with needles). Never mind bottles of piss thrown around festival campsites (stay classy, Reading), issues with crowd safety (there was a worrying “crowd collapse” incident at the Cornish Boardmasters festival recently). Drugs are plentiful, powerful and, when cut amateurishly, far stronger than dealers intended. Weed has long left behind its soppy hippy “starter-high” status. Ketamine, the drug that killed the actor Matthew Perry, is solidly mainstream.
I’m not saying this is all new, I’m saying that the situation looks intensified. That there are valid issues to be concerned about and ignoring them could become an issue in itself.
One element that seems different is the young people. Back in my own wild youth, messy people like me were messy on a full-time basis. We lived in a swirl of drugs, danger, predators and helpful backstage passes. In our own chaotic way, we (kind of) knew what we were doing (sometimes). By contrast, it seems as if many in these crowds wouldn’t even qualify as what used to be called weekenders (part-timers). They’re just kids who’ve finished their exams. In purely practical terms, have they any experience of drugs – do they know their tolerance levels? Which is the precise moment a cool parent might say: well, they have to start somewhere. Really? In a festival field in the small hours with their equally clueless mates?
Please be clear – this isn’t an attack on festival culture: I think that’s brilliant. Nor is it an assault on youthful freedoms: young people, and pandemic-hammered gen Z in particular, are absolutely entitled to a great time. It could even be a sign of cultural good health that they seem to be finally pushing back against the smothering ethos of safe rebellion (Glastonbury with mum and dad) and want to run unmonitored and free.
The problem lies in the refusal of some parents to accept that anything might have changed (become more problematic) from their rosy-hued memories of groovy bops and half an ecstasy tablet at sunset. The scoffing insistence that discussing it is pearl-clutching scaremongering. The lack of recognition that they might have ill-informed, outmoded notions about what’s happening.
There might also be a strain of arrogance, even narcissism. When I read about Allsopp’s son Interrailing, I didn’t think she was trying to be cool (she was clear she worried about other scenarios), but I thought 15 was too young. I also wondered whether some parents have a romanticised view of their children’s trajectories. Seeing them almost as coming-of-age novels they are helping them to write – casting themselves as wonderful, progressive, open-minded figures. The cool parent in excelsis.
Well, sorry, that isn’t the job. Boundaries have a tendency to get stretchy. If you give them pre-stretched boundaries, kids will stretch them even further. If you’re “cool” about risky behaviours, they’ll find riskier ones you won’t approve off. So, no, don’t lock them away like Rapunzel, but equally don’t throw them to wolves. Tell them they’re unsafe if you have to. Give them a rollicking if necessary. Tell them the truth all the time. As some of us found out the hard way, parenting is not your opportunity to be cool.
• Barbara Ellen is an Observer columnist
