Give your little despot a lazy summer

When my five-year-old daughter asked her tennis instructor, Rocco, to come on holiday with us so that she could have constant tutoring, I actually started thinking about how it might work. Should he stay in a local hotel, or be in the house with us? What would he do in the evenings? Then I realised madness had set in: so seriously do we take our children's ideas nowadays that it takes a moment to remember that they're not running the show, and that wish-fufilment was never meant to be a daily event.

With the summer holidays upon us, the issue of how to make sure children have a lovely time without becoming little despots or over-scheduled, exhausted ciphers of competitive parenting becomes pressing. The darlings have seven empty weeks stretching from now until September, and something has to fill them.

Or does it? As I remember, the joy of summer was that it seemed never to end, and the less there was to do, the more one's imagination kicked in. The "kindergarchy" (Joseph Epstein's term for contemporary America, where children have taken centre stage, and parents become their "indentured servants"), however, dictates that our little demigods must have an endless flow of treats and be fussed over and negotiated with, as if childhood was one long therapy session.

Knowing this, supermarkets now place a row of colourful TV tie-in magazines complete with cover-mounts on the bottom shelf where small hands can find them. Even celebrity mothers, not immune to the kindergarchy, insist that they "don't have a nanny" so that you know how fashionablyhands-on they are (never mind the housekeeperor the army of non-specific assistants). School holidays and working mothers is a particularly challenging combination, partly because guilt has a tendency to beef up treats and encourage the notion of the P.O.D (present of the day).

Even actually being on holiday isn't enough: I've seen eight adults and five children wait for a sixyearold to decide where she wanted to go before anyone could set off. For some, becoming childcentric is an escape from making decisions.

Aside from the dangers of raising a generation of narcissists, kindergarchy has a more sinister side: there is now an army of "experts" waiting to label children barely out of nappies for being too shy or too boisterous. Children don't need to be the same any more than they need to be worshipped. Rocco will have to make other plans this year.

Catherine Ostler is editor of ES Magazine.