Stop treating our children as victims

🎾 Padel courts | 🌳 “Tree of death” | 😴 996 routine

In the headlines

Two people have been killed and at least three injured after a car and knife attack on a synagogue in Manchester. The suspect is believed to be dead after he was shot by police on trying to enter the building. Keir Starmer – who says he is “appalled” by the attack, particularly coming on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar – will fly home from a summit of European leaders in Copenhagen to chair a Cobra meeting. Kemi Badenoch says she will scrap Britain’s “failed” climate change laws if the Conservatives regain power, including ditching electric car targets and plans to phase out gas boilers. “We want to leave a cleaner environment for our children,” she said, “but not by bankrupting the country.” The British conservationist Jane Goodall has died aged 91. Widely considered the world’s leading chimpanzee expert, Goodall was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House earlier this year for her “groundbreaking” work, which “redefined our understanding of the connection between humans, animals, and the environment we share”.

Getty

Comment

Tina Fey in Mean Girls (2004): when teachers were teaching, not therapising

Stop treating our children as victims

Pick up any of the many wellbeing questionnaires now being handed out to British schoolchildren and you’ll see a list of “increasingly alarming statements” that they can agree with wholeheartedly, a little, or not at all, says Celia Walden in The Daily Telegraph: “I feel lonely”, “Nobody likes me”, “I cry a lot”, “I worry a lot”. It’s like some “awful multiple-choice fever dream”. Children as young as 11 are being questioned about their gender identity, emotional regulation and life satisfaction – not something I remember agonising over at that age, “my satisfaction levels being largely based on how many strawberry laces I was allowed to eat”. It all seems to imply that as a child you not only have emotional difficulties but are “mired in them”. And when you’re a child, “implications are powerful”.

Schools should, of course, foster an environment where an unhappy child can talk to their teacher. But in many cases this “fetishisation of feelings and happiness” is counter-productive. Schools have become therapeutic institutions “with a bit of maths and grammar thrown in” – teachers are handing out diagnoses they’re not qualified to make and labelling any small slight a “trauma”. As the former Ofsted boss Baroness Spielman said recently, it’s worth remembering that adolescence is full of “lumps and bumps” you have to experience to become a resilient adult. If children are taught to embrace every worry, fear, anxiety and sadness, they’ll never become a “load-bearing wall”. Knowing how to spot when a child is experiencing “more than the ordinary lumps and bumps” is a crucial part of being a teacher. “Pathologising” normal childhood experiences will only “set whole generations up to fail”.

Sport

Tatler has compiled a list of the “chicest padel courts in Britain”. They include the outdoor facilities at The Hurlingham Club in west London; the two courts in the “rolling verdant lawns” of Estelle Manor in the Cotswolds; The Pollen Club in Manchester, which is covered and comes with a lounge area and bar; Padel Social Club in Earl’s Court, where Stormzy, Tom Holland and “all of hot young west London” go to play; and CPASE in Cheshire, where a top Mallorcan padel coach charges £150 an hour for private lessons. To see the rest, click on the image.

Inside politics

With his third leadership bid embarrassingly aborted, Andy Burnham slunk off from the Labour conference before Keir Starmer’s speech, says Tim Shipman in The Spectator. And the “Starmtroopers” are rejoicing. A senior figure close to the prime minister joked: “We were very lucky that our secret agent Burnham was prepared to go undercover for us in this way.” A former cabinet minister declared the Greater Manchester mayor “a clown”. And as one indecorous individual put it: “Poor Andy. He shot his bolt during the foreplay.”

Games

If you want some “very silly” puzzles, says Alex Bellos in The Guardian, you might like Louis Catlett’s Say What Ewe Sea: A Very Silly Visual Puzzle Book. It’s the “perfect stocking filler” for any wordplay lover. More teasers, and answers to the clues above, here; pre-order a copy here.

Comment

Reeves with Starmer: “she flunked the growth bit”. Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty

No wonder Labour voters are cross

For those who believe the Conservatives are toast, it’s worth considering just “how hated Labour are about to become”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. To justify her second round of tax rises – “which she promised would never come” – Rachel Reeves says: “Everyone can see in the last year the world has changed.” Can they? The Ukraine war started in 2022; Gaza in 2023. Inflation pre-dates Labour, as does the global rise in borrowing costs. If she means Donald Trump’s tariffs, he led the polls when Labour took office and has banged on about tariffs his entire political life. She said growth would negate the need for new taxes. She was wrong, because “she flunked the growth bit”.

So: Reeves has no mandate to raise taxes, and when she raises them anyway, the people most upset will be the middle-class professionals who took a “slightly thoughtless punt” on Labour in 2024. How will these voters feel as the government drifts “ever further leftward”? All party pressure pushes Keir Starmer in that direction, and there’s no evidence he has the fibre to resist it. “Sixty-three-year-olds don’t sprout new vertebrae.” Yes, the right-of-centre vote is split between the Tories and Reform UK, but its overall size should increase, and in favour of the Conservatives. And present form is no guide to future performance. If the Tories saw an uptick in the polls, donations would tumble in and “smart graduates with an eye for the main chance” would join; Reform has a large and enthusiastic membership, but so did Labour when it got marmalised in 2019. In British politics, four years is an “eternity”. All the Tories need is for “two rivals to falter”.

Nature

Manchineel trees at Buccoo Beach in Tobago. Getty/Mark Meredith

The manchineel is “the most dangerous tree on Earth”, says CaLea Johnson in Mental Floss. It’s found in parts of southern Florida, Central America, South America and the Caribbean. A single touch is enough to cause severe skin irritation and temporary blindness, and even standing under one when it’s raining can cause pain. And whatever you do, don’t eat its round, green fruit – that can lead to blistering and swelling around the mouth and throat, digestive tract damage, vomiting, abdominal bleeding, and, in some cases, death. In Spanish-speaking areas it’s known as manzanilla de la muerte, or “little apple of death”.

Zeitgeist

Work-mad US techies are taking a leaf out of their Chinese counterparts’ book, says Lora Kelley in The New York Times: embracing the punishing “996” routine to get ahead. This work schedule – made famous by the startups and sweatshops of Shenzhen – involves toiling from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. It’s now illegal in China to compel workers to put in a 72-hour week, but that hasn’t stopped the Silicon Valley crowd choosing to do it anyway – firms are noting their expectations of a 70-hour work week in job descriptions, and corporate credit card transactions have spiked on Saturdays.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It’s Chris Brown, says the New York Post, a British explorer who has become the first person to reach seven of the planet’s eight “Poles of Inaccessibility” – the exact spot on a continent or ocean that is furthest from the nearest coast in any direction. The 63-year-old made it to the notoriously difficult-to-reach Arctic PIA, about 400 miles from the geographic North Pole, having already ticked off North America, South America, Africa, Australia, the Antarctic and Point Nemo in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Next, and last, is the Eurasian pole in north-west China. “I thought maybe three or four would be achievable,” he says. “But here we are.”

Quoted

“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”
Jane Goodall

That’s it. You’re done.

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