A tragic story emerges from the heart of Middle England: a young man named Vincent, whose parents, by his own account, 'never say he’s good enough.' The anecdote, shared with mental health charities, has prompted fresh calls for stronger family support laws. But before we rush to draft yet another piece of legislation, let us pause. Let us consider whether this is a failure of the state or a failure of the soul.
Mental health charities see Vincent as a victim of inadequate legal frameworks. They argue that parents must be compelled, perhaps by law, to offer praise and emotional support. They dream of a state that can mandate love, that can legislate against the cold silence of a disappointed father or the raised eyebrow of a perfectionist mother. This is the logic of the age: every emotional wound must find its remedy in a statute.
Yet compare our age with the Victorians. They too had their own Vincent—perhaps a young man struggling to live up to the stern expectations of a paterfamilias. But the Victorian response was not to call for a law. It was to preach resilience, to value character over comfort, to remind the young that life is a trial, not a therapy session. The Victorians understood that a parent’s duty was not to make a child feel good, but to mould a child into a responsible adult. If Vincent’s parents are harsh, it may be because they sense a softness in him, a need for the kind of toughening that only disappointment can provide.
Now, I do not defend cruelty. I do not suggest that parents should be cold or tyrannical. But must we always look to the state to fix what is essentially a domestic ailment? The movement to legislate parental affection is a symptom of a deeper intellectual decadence: the belief that all human problems are fundamentally political, and that the law can substitute for love. This is the fantasy of the modern secularist, who imagines that a parliamentary bill can fill the void left by the retreat of religion and community.
Consider the historical cycle. Rome in its decline saw a similar phenomenon: the state increasingly intervened in the family, offering pensions to soldiers’ widows, subsidising the children of the poor, and eventually replacing the father as the ultimate authority. And we know what happened to Rome. When the family abdicates its moral authority to the state, the family weakens, and the state becomes a cold, bureaucratic parent. The result is not liberation but a new kind of dependency.
Vincent’s parents may indeed be flawed. They may be too restrained, too demanding, too caught up in their own anxieties. But the answer is not to summon the social workers and the solicitors. The answer is to revive a culture of neighbourly care, of extended family, of priestly counsel, of communal wisdom. These are the ancient remedies. They work not because they are enforced, but because they are shared.
Instead, we propose a law. We imagine that by forcing parents to speak kind words, we will heal Vincent’s soul. This is the hubris of the modern intellectual: the assumption that the problems of the human heart can be solved by the instruments of the state. It is a hubris that will end, as it always does, in disappointment.
Let Vincent’s story be a warning. Not a warning against strict parents, but a warning against the creeping statism that would turn every family into a branch of the welfare office. We do not need more laws. We need better fathers and mothers, and that is a task for culture, not for the Crown.
If we continue down this path, we shall find ourselves in a world where every tear is met with a regulation, every sigh with a tribunal. Vincent may be unhappy now, but he will be unhappier still when he realises that the state cannot fill the emptiness left by the absence of true familial love. The state can only mimic it, and mimicry is always a hollow thing.
