A brave woman, Kirstie Allsopp. She allowed her 15-year-old son Oscar Hercules to travel by train through Europe for three weeks with a 16-year-old friend and decided to tell everyone about it.
That was the cue for a mass attack on social media, with some mothers daring to tell her she was asking for trouble, but others praising her common sense.
The uproar began after she posted on X: “My little boy just came back from a three week Interrail trip… with a buddy who’s already 16… but they organized the whole thing: Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Marseille, Toulouse, Barcelona and Madrid.” Five countries in three weeks? Even for an Interrail card that lets you travel all over Europe, that’s quite an achievement.
And everything was fine. There were no breakdowns (or if there were, she didn’t hear about them). He did better than me; when I went to Sicily on an Interrail ticket, my bag was taken from me in the traditional way by a man on a motorbike.
There is no better test of initiative at any age than using an Interrail ticket. You have to make the effort not to lose it – or your passport – and to take the right train to the right place. (Think of Erich Kästner’s story about a boy who was robbed on a train, Emil and the Detectives.)
Allsopp is right that we keep children in a state of dependency for much longer than we used to. In the past, she points out, children regularly entered the workforce at 16. Well, my grandfather went to sea at 14, like Lord Nelson. Back then, children learned a trade straight after school. Now they have to stay in school or training until they are 18.
If you want to see an example of our rapidly changing attitudes towards young people’s work, I refer you to the excellent Ealing comedy, Hue and Cryabout boys in the 1950s, in which the hero is harshly treated by his mother because he has not been able to go to school and has not yet found a job.
Today, 1.84 million young people between the ages of 18 and 24 are neither employed nor looking for work. Around 22 percent of Generation Z have mental health problems. There is a connection. But a large part of the problem, like any other social problem, lies with smartphones.
Several studies show that modern children are less free than previous generations. Allsopp quoted Jonathan Haidt, author of The fearful generationAnd Free-range childrenwho has consistently argued that children need to take risks. If we don’t allow them to play unsupervised, roam, and eventually travel, how can we expect them to grow up?
But a study by the National Trust a few years ago found that children play outside for just over four hours a week on average – half the time their parents spend playing outside. We either keep an eye on our children or, worse, we track their every move with our own smartphones. This is bad for them and bad for us.
My 17-year-old daughter only tells me where she is on special occasions. I hope Oscar Hercules did the same during his entire three weeks in Europe and only contacted me by postcard. That’s the hard part about letting kids run free… not knowing what they’re up to.
But do you know what your kids are probably doing when they’re not on the move? They’re probably online. And there are worse things there than on a train.
