The horror of raising Generation Alpha
Woke primary schools and ‘gentle parenting’ are churning out a generation of mini-Gary Linekers.
Welcome to Generation Alpha. Born between 2010 and 2024, this is a cohort of young children brimming with social progressiveness, environmental righteousness and jarringly left-wing ideologies. Woke doesn’t even come close. I never realised, until I became a parent, how hard it would be to bring up a child in this supposedly enlightened era.
My son is four years old. Call me naïve but I assumed that no one but me would influence his political mindset. I thought I would be in charge, at least while he’s little. But I am absolutely not. There are so many things they say are hard about parenting – weaning and sleep routines and potty training – but no one warned me about this. Your child comes home from their first weeks in reception class and suddenly he’s Jeremy Corbyn.
Primary schools should be educating young children in the three Rs, how to play nicely, how to sing and paint, run and swim and kick a ball. They should not be promoting trans rights and uncontrolled immigration. Of course places of learning have always been places of ideas, debate and free speech (or they used to be). But not primary schools.
Alpha are also known as mini-millennials, as the majority have millennial parents. My son, at four, is late Gen Alpha, early Beta (keep up). While members of my generation were scared of adults and authority figures, these kids have an unshakeable sense of self-worth and pre-eminence. Their voices must be heard.
It’s not just their confident opinions on all matters environmental and multicultural. It’s the hectoring tone and the certainty that they are right. Adults know nothing, whereas they know it all. If you thought snowflake-ism was tedious, just wait until you see the results of ‘gentle parenting’. Your fragile flower is having a meltdown in the supermarket? Won’t eat their Weetabix or put their toys away? Don’t shout. Just listen to their feelings, sit on the floor and work out ‘what’s going on for them’.
I don’t do gentle parenting. I’ve never gone as far as corporal punishment, but in my household there are rules. Oh, and we say please and thank you. (Lest I sound harsh, let me add that I love my son more than words can express. I’m a single mother and raising him is the privilege of my life. It is the hardest and most wonderful thing I’ve ever done.) So, I have managed to maintain parental authority. Still, some days it’s like living with Greta Thunberg: the constant reminders that we are in the end days of climate-change catastrophe, that us adults have already destroyed the planet, that every plastic bottle will end up choking a sea turtle in Thailand and that planes are evil. It’s tempting, some days, to turn off the lights and heating and electronic devices, to take away all the plastic toys and fun holidays abroad, just to show him what Net Zero would actually feel like.
I could handle this – admittedly with gritted teeth. But immigration was the tipping point. Last week I collected my child from school, and, as we cycled home, he made a point of telling me that ‘All refugees are welcome’. On further questioning, he revealed that it was Refugee Week, and they had spent that day’s assembly being lectured by a Somali man. The result is kids with Gary Lineker levels of hypocrisy and delusion, where every foreign arrival is unquestionably fleeing war and persecution, our country’s borders must be eternally open, and our resources are limitless.
There is ample time for Refugee Week. For Earth Day, for Black History Month and Pride and Diwali and Eid. The kids at his primary school spent days constructing small mosques out of Lego. Lest we forget, it is now Disability Pride Month. But look at the response I got from the school when I politely enquired how the children would be marking Armistice Day: ‘Unfortunately due to the timing of the children being outside during the silence this was not undertaken.’ They couldn’t take two minutes to mark the service and sacrifice of our veterans, those older generations who fought and died for our country, those who defended our freedoms and protected our way of life. As someone whose father fought in the Second World War, I find that shameful.
My son’s school (on the leafy Islington / Hackney border) is 89 per cent ethnic minority. Hundreds of different languages and cultures. A good thing, of course. He doesn’t see skin colour as particularly different or even a thing. He sits alongside four-year-old girls wearing hijabs, and is taught by teachers with their heads covered. But when kids answer the school register every morning in a different language, and come home singing Yoruba nursery rhymes, you have to ask where the English education system is heading.
And don’t get me started on sex in schools. One of my son’s peers is being raised as gender-neutral. During the recent heatwave I even received this message from the school: ‘Good morning, please ensure that Ludovic has their sun cream, water bottle and sun hat today.’ He is a boy. He is not plural.
Maybe Gen Alpha will see through the virtue-signalling idiocy, and maybe they will turn out more robust and resilient than their Millennial and Gen Z predecessors. After all, I’m starting to see a healthy cynicism among teenagers who roll their eyes when faced with yet another ‘oppressed minority’ day / week / month. Already my son laughs when we cycle over the rainbow pedestrian crossings, so there’s some hope.
If schools could stop the indoctrination and get back to education, that would help. Let’s hope Generation Alpha grows up with a bit more common sense and backbone than its teachers.
Emma Woolf is an author, presenter and political commentator.