If you were advertising for a parent, you couldn’t come up with a better job description than “must be prepared to worry twenty-four hours a day”. I often thought of this quote—from a character in a Stephen Fry novel—when my kids were small. The little monsters seemed to spend their whole time trying to injure themselves, whether by choking on hot dogs or cavorting on thin ice. Now they are big, I have a different worry. What kind of adults will they be? 

Many of my friends fret that their kids will never grow up. More precisely, they worry that young people these days are slower than previous generations to achieve the traditional markers of adulthood, such as moving out of the family home, attaining financial independence and starting families of their own. “Infantilised”, a bold new book by Keith Hayward, argues that today’s younger generation are indeed less mature than their predecessors were at the same age, thanks to a culture that devalues personal responsibility and promotes silliness. I think this is wrong. In a recent piece for our culture section, I explained why.