There is nothing that says you are growing old more than a sentence that begins with “In my time…”, but here I am.

There was a time, I gather — perhaps from the experience of being on the receiving end of parenting rather than the service-provider end, which it very much feels like now — when expectations of the whole thing were simpler. One hoped to raise children who were decent, reasonably happy, able to cope with the real world, and not a menace to others, perhaps as a result of the first three goals.

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Modern parenting is a much more elaborate operation. It is no longer enough to feed, house, love and generally guide children and hope for the best. We are curating them, making sure that every moment they spend on this earth is optimised. In modern all-rounder hell, our kids must eat right, do well at school, have friends who are good role models, play an instrument (because music and maths, or something), play a team sport (hand-eye coordination), do endless tuitions, not look at screens (bad, the very worst), avoid sugar (enemy number two after screens), and so on. Even playing is not called playing anymore. It is free play, and it has a window in the schedule. I would like to see how many adults could hold themselves to these impossible standards.

To parent today in a way that is even reasonably boast-worthy is to endlessly schedule, supervise, monitor, enrich and improve. Decisions that were previously ordinary now come with inbuilt moral undertones. A snack is not a casual item one might pick up when hungry. It carries the weight of health, discipline and future habits. School holidays spent resting are deemed “wasted”. We are trying to get our kids somewhere — wherever it is we imagine they are meant to reach — quicker and better than the others. Rooted in this, I think, are pride and envy, two rather old-fashioned feelings. We see the optimisation culture around us and fear that other people’s children will get ahead, and ours will be left behind.

This fear is central to modern optimisation culture. Log kya kahenge. So-and-so’s child is in the state swim team, or got a full scholarship to university, and so on. What is yours doing? It is striking how much of modern parenting is organised against FOMO, around anticipated absence: The fear that somewhere another child is doing more, becoming better, getting ahead. It is no longer enough to raise good children; we must all be raising exceptional ones. A rather challenging brief for anyone, adult or child. Children are like adults, in that they sometimes feel lazy and sometimes motivated, hesitate, surge ahead, have self-doubt, fail, try again, and sometimes give up. None of this is accounted for in the graph society currently lays out for them.

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What makes this entire framework even less plausible is that no one can say with any certainty what sort of future it is we are preparing them for. What we can say for sure is that it is more uncertain than it has been in living memory because of the arrival of artificial intelligence. We are in the discovery-of-fire, invention-of-the-wheel territory of change here. Yet we continue to herd and nudge the young through narrow tunnels of achievement as we have known it so far, as if we can confidently predict what forms of excellence will matter in the future and which will not. A great deal of what is currently measured as achievement — perfect recall, conventional academic superiority, several currently coveted professions — is beginning to look alarmingly perishable. All the things we are pushing our kids to excel at may well end up turning into dust.

We need to permit ourselves, as a society, to step back from the impossible standards we are setting for the young. Maybe let them have the TV marathon on Sunday while we doomscroll in peace — let us admit it, we all do it. Maybe tell them it is okay sometimes just to be. And perhaps allow ourselves, too, simply to do our reasonable best and hope for the best.

One of the most important things we can prepare our children for is uncertainty, and that is truer today than ever. To tell them that everything they are doing today, because we tell them to, will reap rewards, when the world ahead may not require or value it at all, is doing them a disservice. We can hope, instead, that they are able to adapt to whatever is coming, because there is no real way to prepare them for a future we cannot yet envision. And that uncertainty is the crux of the human condition. It always has been.

Sibal is the author of Equations (2021)