Should I try the ‘18 summers’ parenting trend? Only if I want to ruin the school holidays | Emma Brockes
Long days with nothing to do is the whole point of summer. Turning it into a ‘making memories’ exercise is creepy and controllingThere are a great many things to dislike...
By Emma Brockes · The Guardian Opinion
Long days with nothing to do is the whole point of summer. Turning it into a ‘making memories’ exercise is creepy and controlling 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. Continue reading...