There was a time when childhood was understood as gloriously provisional: children were shy, loud, frightened, obsessive, contradictory little creatures who tried on selves as casually as pirate hats and princess dresses, and nobody mistook Tuesday’s fixation for metaphysical truth; now a particular strain of Western parenting, steeped in the therapeutic vocabulary of adults who have spent twenty years processing their own trauma, attachment styles, burnout, boundaries, neurodivergence and “authentic selves,” treats every childish wobble as evidence, every discomfort as diagnosis, every preference as revelation.
The intention advertises itself as compassion; the effect is often narcissistic projection. Anxious adults, terrified of getting parenting wrong, cannot tolerate the possibility that a feeling might simply be a feeling, that sadness may be sadness, awkwardness awkwardness, boredom the perfectly rational response to a sterile classroom, fractured attention the predictable consequence of a house full of glowing screens engineered to destroy it.
So the external world recedes and the label advances: the temporary becomes structural, the situational essential, the feeling the self. Nothing may remain small. The lonely afternoon becomes a discourse, the difficult term a framework, the passing phase an identity requiring affirmation, management and an expanding priesthood of consultants, influencers, therapists, trainers and administrators.
It is an oddly airless form of child-centredness in which the child is forever being interpreted by adults unable to stop interpreting themselves. Childhood was once permitted to be messy, wasteful, embarrassing and magnificently wrong; now we are in danger of mistaking the rehearsal for the performance, embalming every experiment in the language of permanent identity and calling it listening. Children are not tiny adults waiting to have their hidden essence decoded. They are unfinished people, and one of the great privileges of childhood is being allowed to become somebody else.
