The parenting book that asks children what their parents got wrong

Dr Žilvinas Svigaris has written a book about raising children with an unusual group of collaborators: his own family.

The parenting industry is not short of instruction. There are books on getting babies to sleep, surviving adolescence, managing screens and raising successful children. Much of it begins from the assumption that adults possess knowledge which must somehow be transferred downwards.

Dr Žilvinas Svigaris starts somewhere else. His new book, Who Educates Parents?, asks what parents might learn in the opposite direction.

Written with contributions from his own family, the book draws on more than two decades of raising three children. Rather than presenting Svigaris as an expert dispensing a set of rules, it allows his children to revisit family experiences themselves, sometimes arriving at rather different memories of the same events.

That difference is central to the book.

Svigaris argues that family life is not simply a process in which parents form their children. Children, in turn, alter the adults raising them.

“Children do not simply receive education, they actively shape the people their parents become,” he writes.

It is an appealingly modest premise for a parenting book. There is no suggestion that a sufficiently disciplined reader can construct the perfect family. Instead, Svigaris is interested in conversation, particularly what happens when parents are prepared to listen to an account of family life that may not correspond with their own.

The book ranges across adolescence, schools, responsibility, creativity, music and family traditions, as well as the increasingly complicated question of preparing children for adulthood when technology and working life are changing quickly.

Svigaris brings an unusual academic background to those questions. His work spans computer science, economics and philosophy, and he has previously written and collaborated on academic work and educational initiatives. Who Educates Parents?, however, is presented as a more personal undertaking.

Its timing also reflects a particular anxiety surrounding modern parenthood. Parents have access to an extraordinary quantity of advice while simultaneously contending with technologies and social pressures that previous generations did not encounter in quite the same form.

Social media has made other families unusually visible. Education is contested. Screens occupy an ever larger part of childhood. Artificial intelligence is beginning to change how children learn and, potentially, the sort of employment for which they are being prepared.

The temptation in such circumstances is to search for certainty.

Svigaris offers relatively little of it.

Instead, Who Educates Parents? makes the case for curiosity, trust and a degree of humility. Authority still has a place in raising children, but the book argues that a healthy family cannot depend upon authority alone.

Perhaps its most interesting device is also its simplest: allowing children into a conversation about parenting that is usually conducted entirely by adults.

Parents may spend years wondering whether they are getting it right. Svigaris suggests there is someone rather obvious they might ask.