First they came with the coffee shops and I didn't speak out because I love a cappuccino. Then they came with the posh bread joints and I didn't speak out because they do a great sourdough. Then they came with the double-fronted estate agents and I didn't speak out because … well, the area is on the up. Then they came with the expensive baby clothes shops where a tiny jumper is the price of jobseeker's allowance and I went quite mad and I can't say it made me very popular.

Gentrification is one thing we are allowed to whinge about in a hypocritical way because somehow it just happens, and though some of us benefit from it, we are not responsible for it.

Children, though? Children, or rather the shops selling extremely expensive stuff for them, the presence of infants in every restaurant, the clogging up of pavement by buggies as big as cars is not something one should object to. Especially not me, as I am guilty of reproduction myself. But I now see that many folk where I live are actually the first people ever to have babies in all of human history! So, no little foldup pushchairs; instead they have buggy cars, and some jog with them. If there is a more annoying sight I have yet to see it. Then it's on to the baby yoga and baby drumming that every six-month-old needs, before the great boring on about schools.

It may take a village to raise a child but actually no one cares about the village once the child is born, as the world around ceases to exist.

Obviously I am describing a particular style of parenting that co-exists alongside clearly deprived and unhappy children. But I have much sympathy with Rory Stewart, the Tory MP for Penrith, a very thoughtful man who has dared to challenge the reign of the child. We often talk of the existence of elderly people – bed-blockers, immobile, mentally ill – as a burden. For we are too busy anyway with our jobs and kids. Stewart pointed to the huge dismay at youth unemployment and complete lack of interest in pensioner poverty. In an essay in Intelligent Life, he went on to say: "Our ancestors have been addicted to honour, craved virtue and wealth, been hooked on conquest, and on God. But ours is the first civilisation to find its deep fulfilment in our descendants. Our opium is our children."

Children as the opium of the masses is an interesting idea. Small children may certainly be this and many people's focus on wider issues immediately narrows once they become parents, even on something such as climate change, which will affect future generations. We just hope science works and open another bottle of wine …

Successive governments have forced parents to become entrepreneurs on behalf of their individual children, for education and as the NHS fragments, also for health. We haven't got time to change the world because we are too busy making sure the kids are OK. So we absolutely rely on this idea that they must fulfil us, which is rather insulting to the child-free.

Every major report of the past few years, though, shows increasing levels of unhappiness in our children, especially teenagers. And this is something more than the common misery of adolescence. The problems started in the mid-90s, but since 2008, surveys have been consistently showing 15-20% of kids with very poor wellbeing. So roughly a fifth of our kids are not flourishing. Add to this the impossibility of them living independently and we find a generation in limbo, often resented by their parents and resentful of their parents. Here ancestor worship v descendent worship breaks down. While we sentimentalise infancy and remain worryingly atavistic – the blonde child "stolen" by Gypsies – we actually regard anyone who hits puberty as suspect. Our ambivalence to other people's children is tangible. Look at them, with their smartphones and total inability to communicate nicely. No wonder they have no prospects.

The issue, then, is not whether we prioritise pensioners over spoilt brats, but how to square respect or even basic care for older people with the insane fetishisation of childhood. Somewhere in the midst of this we must see how the links between the generations are unravelling. Some of these links felt more like chains and, as women became more independent, they broke. But many are weakened by the need for two wages to bring up a family and the idealisation of individual self-contained nuclear families. Stewart suggests the young must shoulder the burden of the old, but they already do, taking on debts for the basics in a situation not of their making.

Children are not the opium of the masses. If so, they would keep us dreamy. The fantasy of the perfect little baby soon morphs into the neglected kids we see in every pupil referral unit. Has it really come to this stark choice? We care for our elders or our children? Surely if the human bonds that cross generations are not made in families we need to encourage them socially. Can you name me one inter-generational space you visit regularly? Just one. As Stewart says: "I'd prefer our opium to be the struggle to create a living civilisation ..." Me too. Pass the pipe.