Should I try the ‘18 summers’ parenting trend? Only if I want to ruin the school holidays

‘The bigger drag behind this concept is the need to turn every last human impulse into an item on a to-do list.’ Photograph: Mariya Borisova/Getty Images

There are a great many things to dislike about modern parenting trends – take your pick from helicopter to snowplow to Fafo – but the least appealing, perhaps, is the temptation present in all of them to treat raising a child like an extended school project.

The latest addition is something called 18 summers, in which clingy parents count down the school holidays they have left with their children before they leave home, pre-grieving the end as they go. There is no quicker way to ruin something than by filtering it through an internet trend, but this one is particularly insidious: an invitation to inject weird notes of anxiety into what might otherwise be an unstudied thing.