In the latest outbreak of national soul-searching, a safeguarding campaign has thrust the case of Vincent, a teenager groomed online by an adult predator, into our living rooms. The campaign’s slogan, ‘Vincent’s parents never say “good enough”’, is designed to remind us that children need validation. But behind this veneer of therapeutic concern lurks a deeper rot: the bizarre, modern insistence that parents must affirm their children at every turn, as if life were one long school prize-giving. This is the very culture that leaves children vulnerable to predators who promise the unconditional approval that no mortal parent can sustain.
Consider the facts. Vincent, like so many of his generation, fell prey to an adult who masqueraded as a friend. The process is tediously familiar: a lonely child, starved of attention, finds a listener online. The predator does not judge. The predator does not say ‘good enough’ or ‘bad enough’. The predator simply exists as a bottomless well of affirmation. And why? Because Vincent’s parents, like so many middle-class guardians, have confused love with a checklist. They have read the parenting manuals. They know they must ‘praise effort not outcome’. They have internalised the dogma of self-esteem, and in doing so, they have raised a child who believes his worth is a fragile thing that must be constantly topped up by others.
This is not a story about individual failure. It is a story about the intellectual and moral decadence of a society that has abandoned the old virtues for the new psychobabble. The Victorians, for all their faults, never told their children they were wonderful every time they tied their shoelaces. They told them to be quiet, to work hard, and to earn their place in the world. The result? A generation of stoics, not a generation of empty vessels waiting for a predator to fill them with approval.
The campaign well-meaningly suggests that parents should say ‘good enough’ more often, as if this were a vaccine against grooming. But the poison is in the very premise. The notion that a child’s security depends on parental affirmation is a modern fiction. What children truly need is structure, boundaries, and a sense of their own resilience. They need to know that the world is a dangerous place and that not everyone who smiles is a friend. Instead, we have raised them in a cocoon of cotton wool, terrified of damaging their fragile self-esteem, and then wonder why they are so easily spun by the first adult who treats them as special.
Let us be clear: the predators are despicable. But their task is made immeasurably easier by a culture that has turned parenting into a constant performance of validation. Vincent’s parents, we are told, never said ‘good enough’. But perhaps the real tragedy is that they believed such words had power. They raised a son who could not withstand a single voice of criticism, and when the predator came bearing compliments, he had no shield.
We need a different conversation. Not about how to make children feel better, but about how to make them stronger. Not about more affirmation, but about more realism. The Fall of Rome was preceded by a collapse of civic virtue and a rise in emotional indulgence. We are not there yet, but the signs are unmistakable. The campaign against grooming should be a call to arms for a renaissance of grit, not a demand for more sticky-sweet parenting.
The next time a well-meaning slogan tells you that children need more praise, think of Vincent. Think of the predator who offered all the praise in the world. And then ask yourself: perhaps the most loving thing a parent can say is not ‘you are good enough’, but ‘you can be better’.
