‘The bigger drag behind this concept is the need to turn every last human impulse into an item on a to-do list.’ Photograph: Mariya Borisova/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘The bigger drag behind this concept is the need to turn every last human impulse into an item on a to-do list.’ Photograph: Mariya Borisova/Getty Images Opinion Parents and parenting Should I try the ‘18 summers’ parenting trend? Only if I want to ruin the school holidays Emma Brockes Long days with nothing to do is the whole point of summer. Turning it into a ‘making memories’ exercise is creepy and controlling
T here are a great many things to dislike about modern parenting trends – take your pick from helicopter to snowplow to Fafo – but the least appealing, perhaps, is the temptation present in all of them to treat raising a child like an extended school project.
The latest addition is something called 18 summers , in which clingy parents count down the school holidays they have left with their children before they leave home, pre-grieving the end as they go. There is no quicker way to ruin something than by filtering it through an internet trend, but this one is particularly insidious: an invitation to inject weird notes of anxiety into what might otherwise be an unstudied thing.
Let’s put to one side for a moment the fact that, in these economic times, kids don’t stop going on holiday with their parents until they’re roughly 35. The idea behind the “viral concept” of 18 summers – tagline “you only get 18 summers with your kid” – is to remind us that life is short and we should cherish each moment, a banality that, if it is ever true, is particularly untrue during the summer holidays, which are very, very long indeed. I would rather sign up to a movement called 18 minutes, in which we recognise the time-warping effect of the slow-crawl towards September, or even 18 seconds, in which we study the fascinating variables in time perception as it relates to unstructured periods with children, which might also be marketed as 18 millennia.
Read more Eighteen summers on the other hand is designed, like most social media trends, to make us feel as if we’re misusing our time by showing us how other, better motivated people are using theirs. This is achieved via a set of social media posts carrying the 18 summers hashtag and which, no matter where in the world the images are generated, looks like a set of adverts for Center Parcs Longleat.
There has always been something creepy about the formalisation of quotidian parts of life, and I would put the phrase “making memories” into that category. It’s the animating ethos behind 18 summers, which comes with a retail shelf full of diaries, binders and other products to ensure we document every precious moment with our children – without enjoying any of them. I’m currently in New York, ground zero of acute parenting trends, where “experiencing joy” may be tackled with the same, furrow-browed intensity as “learning Mandarin” and where parents can become so feverishly intent on “making memories” for their children that they badger them into a state of complete mania. (In this world, going for a bike ride becomes so fraught with meaning it becomes Going For A Bike Ride and you’d better hope it hits that platonic ideal).
The bigger drag behind this concept is the need to turn every last human impulse into an item on a to-do list. Do you enjoy summer while also finding it enraging and boring? Well, try holding it up again…