Oh baby, why your kids are not right, says John Marsden

Middle-class parenting to blame for ‘one of the great scandals of industrialised Western society’.

Novelist John Marsden at his alternative Candlebark school at Romsey, north of Melbourne. Picture: Aaron Francis

Today’s children are so over-protected, so regulated, so ­focused on test results rather than knowledge, so censored and spied on by adults — in short, so babied — that on reaching young adulthood they are “20 going on 6” and find it difficult to deal with the real world.

This “disempowerment and impotence’’ of young people is caused by the main adults in their lives — parents and teachers — and the result is “one of the great scandals of industrialised Western society’’.

This is the view of John Marsden, award-winning writer of young adult novels and founder-principal of two alternative schools in Victoria. His new book, The Art of Growing Up, is not a novel but a manifesto that urges radical changes to parenting and schooling.

“We are seeing an epidemic of damaging parenting at the ­moment,’’ he writes.

“The phenomenon of educated middle-class parents who don’t just love their children but are in love with them has reached a critical level.”

Such parents think their child is perfect and can do no wrong. They pass on their narcissism to their children.

“They minimise their child’s transgressions, have no regard for those hurt by their child’s narcissism … and blame others for their child’s aberrant behaviour. They are doing irreparable damage to their kids.”

In an interview with The Weekend Australian, Marsden, 68, who has six stepsons aged 15-25, says he knows many ­parents will resent and reject what he has to say.

“I don’t mind. I’ll take it as it comes,’’ he says. “I do think there’s a need to be more direct in the way we talk to parents ­because parenthood has become this great untouchable area, this sacred topic, which you dare not criticise except in the most insincere ways.”

Marsden says he can trace the thoughts in his new book back to his own teenage days, “when I ­became frustrated and horrified and disgusted by the ways schools were run.” This led him, in the years that followed, “to question much more the whole dynamic between adults and children and teenagers.”

Marsden believes parents and teachers should let children roam more, physically and intellectually, and accept that their own children will behave badly sometimes, be boring sometimes, be frightened sometimes.

He thinks today’s focus on going from high school to university is a form of economically ­viable “babysitting” for young people who have “outgrown” school or found schooling has “ceased to have value for them”.

Instead of being free to take on adult roles, “they are so often told that there is nothing for them until they are 25 and have had 13 years of primary and secondary education, not to mention four or five years of tertiary studies under their belt.”

“What a waste of ­resources. More importantly, what a dangerous thing to do to the young. No wonder so many of them feel frustrated and enraged.” In the interview, Marsden opens up about his own troubled childhood, about the father who beat him with a rubber hose and the mother who was “very rigid, very righteous, very judgmental, very critical, very self-centred.

“It was hardly what you would call a loving family.”

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John Marsden’s parenting rules

Some advice for adults. Ten quotes from John Marsden’s book The Art of Growing Up

1. “The first principle of good parenting is to be aware of the unhealthy ways we construct childhood and adolescence. Parents may need to rethink their prejudices. Their children may not be as perfect as they pretend to be, and their teenagers might be better than is generally acknowledged.”

2. “We can reasonably assume that a parent who does not say ‘no’ at least once a day to their child is failing as a parent.”

3. “It is worth teaching your children how to be interesting conversationalists. Face it, some kids, like some adults, are boring. Some are excruciatingly boring.’’

4. “Young people have an absolute right to know about puberty, about sex, about politics, about human behaviours, about money, about important global issues. To deliberately block the access of children and teenagers to such essential information is a form of child abuse.”

5. “We must give our children fear. It is a rich and immensely valuable experience to know fear. The only myths many modern parents want to offer children are Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. We are scared to give them the Bogeyman as well, not realising how nourishing the Bogeyman can be.’’

6. “Parents should strongly — even forcefully! — encourage teenagers to get paid jobs. They are, after all, members of a family, not business class passengers on a plane.”

7. “People who feel angry or upset when they get a glimpse of children’s hatred or greed or sexuality or rage or dishonesty are overlooking the fact that the child is acting in the same way as every other human being in the history of the world.”

8. “Every parent should wish for their child nothing more than ‘I want him or her to experience life to the fullest’. Every child should be able to exult in the 10,000 joys that life brings, and feel with full force the sadness of the 10,000 sorrows.”

9. “The only important academic skill needed by children is literacy. We must ensure that children have access to books with realistic characters, credible situations, authentic language and we must not shrink from showing life in all its many forms.”

10. “Parenting means teaching children to get their own
Weet-Bix.”

Read the full interview here