If you think paying £180k for a tutor is mad, wait til you hear what other parents do

A family living in north London is seeking a £180,000-a-year tutor to mould their one-year-old son into an “English gentleman”, so that they can hopefully wave him off to Eton, Winchester or Harrow in 12 years.

The advert, which went viral online and in the papers this week, requests a tutor from a “socially appropriate background” (read: impoverished posho in need of a well-paid job), who is blessed with an “extensive vocabulary”, and speaks in received pronunciation (RP).

The right person for the job should also be qualified to work with “ultra-high-net-worth and royal families” (so no complaining when your Christmas hols are cancelled at the last minute because they need you to fly to Switzerland) and must be au fait with institutions like the Pony Club. Applicants are now scrambling for the lucrative post that involves immersing the child in “quintessentially British experiences” and wheeling his buggy around museums.

While many other parents, including myself, will have been concentrating on baby-led weaning, or reading their child lift-the flap books by Julia Donaldson, this family want the boy’s early years shaped with trips to Lord's, Wimbledon and Twickenham, to teach him an “age-appropriate understanding of cricket, tennis, rugby and other sports such as equestrianism (including polo) and rowing”. Phew, short shrift for Tumble Tots.

“Good grief. Poor kid,” one person wrote. Someone else said: “Sounds like a home as full of warmth as an igloo in the Arctic on a particularly cold day.” Another commented: “Those parents sound insufferable.”

Alan Caller, the founder of Tutors International, which is recruiting on behalf of the family, claims that requests like this are not unusual, telling the Daily Mail, “The value of Britishness, globally, outside of Britain, is very high.”

Okay, getting your son a tutor so he can aspire to mingle with members of the royal family is possibly one of the more extreme forms of helicopter parenting, but it’s not a crime.

Parents like this, including tiger mums, might be irritating at the school gates, especially to jellyfish mums, like me, who take the more laid-back, relaxed, and flexible approach – but they only want what’s best for their child.

I tend to steer clear of tiger mums, though. It makes me feel anxious to be around them, as if I’m not doing enough for my kids. One of my daughter’s friends at her primary school has been learning Mandarin and took a bilingual swimming coach on holiday.

Another child’s mum is always yawning because she gets up at the crack of dawn – 4am to be exact – to take her daughter to the pool so she can hopefully win a place on the junior England swimming squad.

One dad friend speaks to his children only in Chinese, even though he is British and has no connection to China. He sees it as a challenge for them.

Earlier this month, parents were banned from attending sports events across 40 primary schools in southwest London for being competitive, abusive, and getting in the way.

The Merton School Sport Partnership, who run the sporting events in primary schools in locations like Wimbledon and Merton, made the decision, due to their attendance causing a “stressful environment for the participants, with too much pressure around performance and winning at all costs” and accused them of “challenging organisers and officials around rules and decisions”.

Yet we shouldn’t be telling parents off; we should be helping them.

Tiger parenting isn’t born of malice; it’s an expression of love filtered through the lens of trauma, such as poverty or discrimination. It’s a way for parents to manage their anxieties about their child’s future and to live vicariously through them by giving them opportunities they often never had.

This manifests as overbearing and controlling parenting. It focuses on academic and material success as the path to a better future for their children, and takes away a lot of the child’s decision-making.

It sets a child up to believe that external validation is what makes them okay, leading them to prioritise success above all else, and results in significant pressure and a lack of self-love.

I didn’t have helicopter parents, but in many respects, I grew up believing that being top of my class and looking perfect made me lovable. I ended up having to detangle the myth and find my true self in rehab after I spiralled into alcoholism in my early twenties.

God knows how this little boy will feel one day waltzing around in a tweed jacket and with a plummy accent – knowing deep down that it’s not really him at his core. That’s if he doesn’t rebel first and hate his parents for what they’ve done.

But pointing the finger at others with different parenting styles is shortsighted. It fails to acknowledge that, as parents, we all try to mould our children to a certain extent, even if our parenting style is free-range, permissive, scaffolding, or snowplough.

It takes reflection and hard inner work to learn how to stop projecting our own fears and insecurities onto our children, and let go enough to allow them to become whatever they want to be.