Nigel Latta - Politically Incorrect Parenting: Before Your Kids Drive You Crazy, Read This!

One could be forgiven for thinking that, somewhere between about 1982 and 1992, they started making kids from different stuff to all the previous generations of kids that had ever gone before. Up until then, kids were kids. They fell over, got dirty, played with their friends, and did all kinds of things that kids had always done. They rode in cars without triple-certified child carseats, walked to school by themselves, played in playgrounds with concrete paths, lived in houses without those little plastic plug point-guards, and ate stuff with truckloads of food colouring in it with a mad abandon.

Its a wonder the human race made it through those reckless decades at all.

Somewhere along the way, however, we all started to lose our way a bit. Life got busier and more complicated. Soon we got mobile phones, desktops and DVDs. The people who sell shampoo and the like decided that there was a thing called Generation X, who in their turn decided they didnt want to decide about anything. Now I think were up to Generation Z, and the people selling shampoo are still trying to make soap sound like rocket science.

Soap is soap, people, lets not forget that. It isnt really honey extracts and aloe: its soap.

In amongst all that, kids seem to have been getting steadily more complicated, and apparently more delicate as well. You could be forgiven for thinking that the poor wee bunnies were made of glass the way some people talk. Somewhere along the way some sandal-wearing hippy started calling kids young people, and its all been pretty much downhill from there.

In addition, every time you turn on the television some reporter is telling you about some new research from the University of Poomfahfah which clearly demonstrates that were all basically completely crap and our children are doomed because were so crap.

Of course theres a 98% chance that the reporter is wrong, because in my experience journalists do an appalling job of covering social science research. In fact be wary whenever anyone is telling you what science has discovered about children. I am constantly amazedand often actually appalledat how woefully, and sometimes wilfully, inaccurate many so-called experts can be.

Beware experts.

Particularly experts who write parenting books.

As an example of how mad the world has become, let me tell you briefly about one of my own experiences as a parent. When my elder son started school he had a few speed wobbles to begin with.

Hes a great wee man and I love him to bits, but hes also as stubborn as a mule that has been genetically altered and had a super-stubborn gene welded onto the toughest chromosome in the bunch. (After extensive and very complex psychological testing I have concluded he gets this from his mother.) Hed been having a few settling-in issuestesting the limits and the likewhich is simply how he does business. My boy is a fence-rattler.

His teacher at the time was greatvery experiencedand was on to him from the start. My wife and I breathed a sigh of relief when we first met her, because we knew she was the best first teacher we could have had for our guy. However, halfway through this meeting I suddenly tumbled to the fact that she was diplomatically asking our permission to discipline him in class when he pushed too far.

I told her that she had our full confidence and she should do whatever she thought was right. Put him in a box in the cupboard if you think itll help get the message through, I said, hoping that she knew I was joking and didnt think we actually did that at home. I also told her that, if he came home saying his teacher had been mean to him, we wouldnt be ringing her up whining about how shed upset our little angel. Wed ask him what hed done in the first place.

Its absolutely barking mad that teachers feel they need to ask parents permission to discipline children at school. They do, of course, because the whiney brigade will ring the school as soon as their dear little ones get home, anxious that poor wee Tarquins self-esteem may have been irreparably damaged.

Teachers needing to ask if they can discipline kids? Weve really lost our way.

Sometimes Tarquin might actually need a metaphorical boot up the jacksie, so to speak.

Everything has become so bloody complicated. Many of the simple pleasures are being eroded away because were so frightened, anxious, and self-doubting as parents. Were all desperately worried about screwing it up and making our children emotional cripples for life.

Heres the thing, though: we all screw it up in one way or another. Were parentsthats our job. Just like we have to survive them, our kids have to survive us. If they can make it past us, then theyll probably be fine. Think of it as a form of social natural selection. Raising kids is the greatest form of reality television there is, just without the television. The other down side is that you cant vote people off, which is a bit of a shame. You also dont get a million dollars at the other end. You do, thoughif youre half-decent and a bit luckyget some pretty nice memories to grow old with.

Keeping pace with all this complication and preciousness has been a host of books and documentaries telling you all about how you should raise kids to minimize the chances of turning them into emotional cripples. You can buy books about how to raise the smartest kids, the most confident kids, the most creative kids, the most free-spirited kids, and every other kind of kid you could ever think of.

Bollocks to all that. This is not one of those books.

And yes, I fully get the irony of me saying this when Im the guy who made The Politically Incorrect Parenting Show, and who has now also published a number of books on raising kids that (in my mums opinion) are the best ever written. So, yes, there are buckets of irony to go around here. The problem is that if you want to get a message out to people then books and television shows are pretty much the only way to do that. I suppose I could have gone for carrier pigeons, but I dont think our cat would have coped with the stress of the endless cooing. Theres no way around the fact that if you want to get a message out, then telly and books are pretty much the most cat-friendly way to do that.