When I was growing up, it was fashionable to talk about the generation gap. This was a catch-phrase that turned up in magazine journalism. It was about as popular as ‘brain drain’ and ‘culture shock’. They’ve all vanished because we now see ourselves differently. (By we, I mean, the middle-class, the people with money and the people who are made to worry about everything. Those without irony often refer to us as ‘the chattering classes’ as if they were not part of the problem if ‘chattering’ is a problem.) We have turned the brain drain into a celebration of the NRI and no one has to explain why their sons and daughters are abroad; everyone understands that their talents and skills have found space ‘there’.

Sly pleasures

Culture shock cannot be part of the response patterns of the global citizen who seeks skid marks on his passport. We now arrive with insider information from a million mouths and we know what to expect. To admit to suffering from any form of culture shock would be to admit that one is naive enough to expect people to be the same everywhere. And it is a cliché of the world tourist that he goes to people-watch and thus the differences will be part of the sly pleasures of travel rather than the source of discomfort.

The generation gap has been subsumed into the larger matrix of the hipster parent. “She tells me everything,” says Mom. “I told him he should learn to drink with me,” says Dad. I refrain from comment. I have never been a parent nor have I suffered from the desire to be one, so I keep my responses non-committal. I just look at the somewhat sullen faces of the hipster kids and I feel a wave of compassion.

It seems as if they have been set an impossible task. They must enjoy what they have and must strive to overcome it. They must live in the moment and must keep an eye on the future. They must, they must, they must.

We hedge them around with tasks and goals and watch as they ignore them and seek other improbable goals: social success in a limited circle of acquaintances, the perfect image on social media, bodies and faces and hair by big business. We can see how easily they could be happy and how inevitably they choose to turn away from happiness and we get really, really angry.

Masks, mostly

We say it is the waste of potential. We say that they could be so much better were it not for [add detected flaw here]. Even as we begin the lecture, we can see the masks slipping on, the mask of pretence, the mask of agreement, the mask of repentance, all of which covers the grim face of mutiny.

Perhaps they can smell the fuel that generates the lecture: envy. They are the young, the inheritors of the earth, they are tomorrow. They have everything to look forward to while we can only look back in a mixture of anger and nostalgia. They have no idea how lucky they are.

And yet, and yet. Every day I hear about young people beginning to fall prey to depression and anxiety. Their parents are dumbfounded. I once told a pregnant friend, “A child is a machine designed to make you a second-class citizen in your own life. But it is designed so well, you give it supremacy willingly.”

Most parents I know build their worlds around their children. Vacations are based on when school is out. Sleep timings are fixed by the imperium of the school bus. Some moms know the history syllabus as well as their little daughters. They do it all and suddenly, out of nowhere, the child crumbles.

It is easy to line up the reasons. We have built a civilisation that places a premium on competition, not cooperation. (‘My boy stood first in class’.) We have created a monster child who needs to do everything. (‘My daughter does taekwondo on Monday, ballet on Tuesday, swimming on Wednesday, mental gym on Thursday, Bharatanatyam on Friday, ballroom dancing on Saturday and epibionics on Sunday’).

The children themselves live in a spotlight of their own creation with social media, thus magnifying everything from success to rejection by broadcasting it to everyone else. And then there are those who will put it down to the amount of chemicals we have in our air and our water and the radiations emitted by cellphone towers.

None of this makes sense to the parents of a child who is cutting herself in order to break through the numbness and into some form of feeling. None of this comforts parents who are sitting outside a psychiatrist’s office and looking at their first prescription for tranquilisers. It’s easy in hindsight to blame the parents. You put pressure on the child and so she cracked because she could not live up to your expectations. You didn’t put pressure on the child and so he thinks he is entitled to a good life without having to work for it.

Actually parenting seems to me to be a game of chance involving so many different factors that you shouldn’t even begin to try and codify it. And that is all we do. We see a woman in a shop with a child having a tantrum. She gives in and we think: Bad idea, Mom, your child is going to do this again and again. She walks away and we think: Bad idea, Mom, your child is going to have abandonment anxieties. She kneels down to talk to the child and we think: Bad idea, Mom, that’s not a human being, that’s a bundle of near-uncontrollable desires only made controllable by the size of the package.

The problem is the uniqueness of the parent, the uniqueness of the child, and the resultant uniqueness of the bond between them. And finally, there’s just plain luck. Some kids get through, some kids fall through. But the whole edifice of the parenting industry — which is built on guilt — would collapse if we admitted that every parent is flying by the seat of her pants into a fog without enough fuel.

From where I’m sitting, it looks heroic.

The writer admits there is no epibionics class nor does he know what it means but he is going to patent the idea so if you’re thinking of opening a class of that kind, be warned.