A chat with Dad

Laurie and Matthew Taylor are a father and son who have drawn both on their relationship and their academic/policy-making professional backgrounds to put together this short polemic about parenthood. It has already attracted some opprobrium, one cause of which no doubt is its facetious, attention-seeking title. What are any of us for? What aren't we for? To ask such a question - and they never, by the way, seriously set about trying to answer it - implies a view of children as entirely distinct from and inferior to adults, a position that Laurie, like many parents of his generation, subscribes to without embarrassment.

Matthew, his son, is the director of the Left-wing think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research, and presumably likes to make a splash with questions of this sort; but he is also the book's central tragedy, and though they pretend this isn't so, the book is so titled, it transpires, for entirely personal reasons. The question was one Matthew was driven to ask as a child, in the face of his father's indifference to him. It has rather a different ring to it in the light of that information.

Nevertheless, the pair have used their own relationship as the starting point for a treatise that argues that people are more and more asking themselves precisely such questions, and that declining birth rates among the middle classes are the evidence of their failure to find an answer.

Our prosperity and leisure, they argue, have made us unfit for parenthood. We are no longer willing to relinquish our lifestyles before the humble prospect of unrewarded nurture. Moreover, the "point" of having children - this being, apparently, that one could pass on to them one's profession, religion and aspirations - is these days no longer clear.

Not only are today's children uninterested in learning the rudiments of market gardening, you can't even get them out of their rooms. There they sit, glued to their PlayStations like ectoplasm.

In the past, children played outdoors all day long; you never saw them, they flitted about at dusk like bats, and they did that because their parents were somehow larger and more liberal, less emasculated by the detail, than their children seem able to be in the face of their own offspring.

First things first - if middle-class parents can't even get their children away from television and computer games, how do they think low-income parents, living on dangerous estates are coping with keeping their boys away from gangs and drugs? And the vision of a generation of children who never see daylight is one often conjured up for us by London-based sociologists, who rarely breach the M25: if they did they would find childhood rubbing along indoors and out well enough, traffic and weather permitting.

In any case, I don't buy all this harking back to a golden era of parental neglect.

Our parents certainly expected us to entertain ourselves, and probably didn't worry if they didn't see us for an hour or two, but what exactly is there to admire in that? They didn't necessarily do it for our own good - it's far more likely that they simply didn't want the hassle of looking after us.

I am sure I am not alone in being able to say that I would have preferred it if my parents had wanted to spend the time with me, and that, like Matthew Taylor, my own intensity as a parent is in part the result of their detachment.

The Taylors clothe this point with a lot of talk about career women baulking at the figure of 2.1 that will ensure the future survival of the north London dinner party, but really one is merely being permitted to listen in on a private, and rather painful, conversation.