Enough of the 'children these days' insults ... they're just human beings

Gentle parenting ruins young people, insists 'Britain's strictest head'.

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You've heard the terrible news, I'm sure. Our children are pampered. We raise the coddled brats not as stern parents but simpering friends. We flatter their whims and let them bury their heads in screens. We fetishise what they feel, care not for what they learn, and neglect what they need: that good old-fashioned common-sense discipline that raised the great generations of times past.

Inarguably the greatest peddler of this diagnosis is Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain's Strictest Headmistress™ and co-founder of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, which boasts fastidious adherence to uniforms, timed loo breaks and silent corridors. In an interview with the Times last week, she yet again bemoaned the "gentle parenting" that is leaving her students illequipped for modern life.

Her approach is hardly new. Amy Chua's 2011 bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, preached stern, academically focused parenting, in which withholding compliments, denying playdates and banning sleepovers were the order of the day. It was a sensation at the time (and, in fact, so influential to this cohort that Michaela would release a book entitled Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers two years later).