IT’S HARD work being a parent these days.  Even conceiving, once supposed to be the fun bit, takes commitment and planning.

The super-ambitious parents know that if they can time it for their babies to be born in the Autumn, they will go on to be the oldest in the class and therefore statistically twenty-five per cent more likely to get a place at Oxford or Cambridge.

Indeed, it seems that some parents are taking this quite seriously. Over the last decade, government figures show September and October have been consistently among the three most popular months to give birth in this country.

So, say even after months of planning, you and your partner have picked the right night. That’s just the start.

No sooner has sperm successfully met egg than parents turning the womb into their foetus’ first classroom. Unborn babies become the captive audience for classical music blasted in utero, the problem being that they don’t yet have ears.

Once safely delivered, infants have barely drawn their first breath before parents are fretting about their Apgar scores.

Now the curriculum proper now begins: flashcards before infants can see, baby sign language classes before they can talk and baby swimming classes before they can walk.

So what happened to make us all work so hard?

How did the quaint Victorian idea that children should be seen but not heard, and it was up to God to decide how they turned out,  give way  to the idea that we, their parents, are responsible for every success or failure?

First it was Freud who pointed out at the start of the last century that we could make or break our kids with our parenting, (a word which never used to be a verb.)

Then the break-down of the class system meant we could encourage our children up the class ladder by getting them in grammar school. Schooling became standardised. The introduction of O and A levels in the 1950s meant that, for the first time, children’s achievements could be compared. Contraception meant couples had fewer children, so they tended to invest in them more.

But even still, up until the Eighties, youngsters were generally left to develop at their own pace. Parents didn’t consider they could do much to influence their child’s brain power. Schooling was considered best left to schools. Being told to  ‘go and play’ was not yet regarded as child neglect.

Then the science kicked in. Misreadings of the Mozart Effect and of discoveries about brain growth made parents think the more they stimulated their babies, the cleverer they would be. Parenting books stopped focusing on basics and concentrated on raising IQ instead. One bestseller, How to Have a Smarter Baby, promised a rise of 30 points.

Finally it was the listings and the rankings which sealed our children’s fate as the most fretted about generation in history.

On a warm summer’s day in August in 1991, during the the ‘silly season’ in newspapers, the education correspondent of the Daily Telegraph arrived at his office and wondered what he was going to write that day.

With time on his hands, John Clare started ringing round head teachers and asking them how many of their  A level exams had been graded A or B. He ended up phoning 100 schools and listed them in order of their percentages of top grades.

Parent were transfixed. Schools, especially those that did not perform as well as their reputation suggested, were mortified. The Tory government seized on them as a way to banish complacency and shine a searchlight on sinking schools and poor teaching.

But though they were meant to rank institutions, a quarter of a century later league tables have come to be used to rank our children.

Our schools have become giant testing centres. Head teachers have become like the chairmen of public companies, judged on their fluctuating stocks and shares. Pupils are their commodities and the maximum profit must squeezed out of them.

The result is that schools have become as pushy as parents,  creating a self-reinforcing combination which is miserable for everyone.

But the testing got bigger still. Countries started to rank each other. The first global league tables in 2000, triggered a wave of panic among Western counties terrified of slipping far behind Far Eastern competitors. By 2009 UK had dropped to 25^th place for reading and 28^th for maths.

Politicians piled in to condemn children for not working hard enough. The UK’s then Education Secretary, Michael Gove, called it a “Sputnik moment” after the shock the US got when it realised the Soviet Union was pulling ahead in the Space Race.

National pride was dented. How could the nation that produced Dickens and Shakespeare lag so far behind in literacy? “Britain is the thick man of Europe”, screamed one newspaper headline. “Bottom of the class!” shouted another.

The message was  clear. We’d better crack down on schools or we’d be done for.

And so education became purely about doing well in exams. Learning stopped being about kids immersing themselves in a subject. It became about cramming enough information for the next test lurking around the corner.

The result is that children have become treated not so much as individuals, but more like footsoldiers to triumph over other youngsters in other parts of the country, and ultimately other countries in the world.

How confusing it must be for a child today. On the one hand we endlessly tell them they are special. On the other, we allow them to be dehumanised by marching them through a shape-sorter exam system devised only to arm them for the economic battle ahead.

Needless to say, acting like their career coaches takes the all the fun out of parenting. The result is that we moan continually about how expensive and exhausting it is having kids.

No doubt the same thing they will be saying about us when they dispatch us off to old age people’s homes – because we are no longer pulling our weight either in a few years’ time.

But that’s what happens when you treat members of your family like pawns in a game of economic growth. It dehumanises us all.

ENDS

Taming the Tiger Parent: How to put your child’s well-being first in a competitive world is published by Constable Little Brown, and is now available in the Idler Book shop.

Tanith Carey is the author of seven books, ranging in subject  from biography to social history and parenting.

She also writes opinion and features for a variety of publications including The Guardian, The Independent, and Sunday Times Style.

Tanith’s latest book, Taming the Tiger Parent – How to put the Well-being of your Child First in a Competitive World was published by Constable/Little Brown in September, 2014.

Her parenting books aim to address the most pressing issues for parents and look at how the wider culture affects how we raise our children.

Her next will be Girls, Uninterrupted: How To Raise Strong Daughters, to be published by Icon in January, 2015.

Tanith lives in London with her two daughters, age 12 and 9, her journalist husband, Anthony Harwood, their dog and their cat.

Follow Tanith @Tanithcarey, join her Facebook page Where Has My Little Girl Gone? and read her blogs on www.tanithcarey.com.