Conville & Walsh

Childhood is under threat. We no longer look on it as a separate stage of life, as a time of anarchy and wonder with its own rules and rhythms. Instead, we treat children like mini-adults. From the moment of conception, we start fretting over how to perfect them, how to help them steal a march on their peers, how to fill up every moment of their day with useful activity. At the same time, we mollycoddle the young, driven by fear to forbid them to walk to school or play outside alone. In this perfectionist, competitive age, we want to give our children the best of everything and make them the best at everything. The result is a new and damaging culture of ‘hyper-parenting.’ No longer something that comes naturally, parenting is now a skill to be studied, agonized over and mastered; it is a competitive sport.

UNDER PRESSURE will expose the folly of striving obsessively to raise an alpha child, and show how everyone can benefit from a more relaxed, playful approach to parenting. Using stories from real parents and children, the book will take the reader from Asia to North America to Europe to visit classrooms, playgrounds, a virginity retreat, summer camps, sport centres, a Harry Potter convention, toy companies, television studios, computer labs, a videogaming
conference, a child beauty pageant, a plastic-surgery clinic for teens and more.