The car is where I’ve discovered most about my parenting.

There was that time when I, a very young father, oh-so-briefly and absentmindedly left Number One Daughter in her baby capsule on the roof of the clapped-out Morris. It all turned out fine. So much so that she is now about to have her own child.



And there was the time when Number One Son, aged about two, bellowed from the back of the car, “Ahh fuck – you idiot!” I’d just slammed on the brakes, inspiring him to speak with perfect intonation in precise mimicry of ... words I may have previously uttered from behind the wheel in a similar situation.

Which brings me to something Number Two Daughter, a nearly-teen, said in the car a few months ago.



“Mum and Dad – I don’t want you to be upset at this or anything,” she began.

She had our attention. “Yes?” came our chorus.

She continued, “OK and when I talk about you in what I’m about to say I don’t actually mean you personally – I mean your generation. OK?”

“Yes ... ”

“Well, you’re wrecking the world for my generation. The world is more unsafe than when you were kids, more and more species are going extinct, there are more refugees and the world is meaner to them, there are more wars, there’s more terrorism and more racism and you haven’t stopped climate change. No offence – but it’s true. You’re ruining the world.”

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For good measure she also threw in something about being priced out of the housing market.

It’s impossible to overstate quite how devastating this was.

Devastating – because it’s mostly true. Those of us gen Xers in our early to mid-50s inhabit a world that is vastly more dangerous and uncertain than the one we were bequeathed. Us gen X men were the first generation since federation not to be forced or urged to go to war. We all had free tertiary education, stable government, a strong national and global economy, reasonable job prospects and security and, despite ridiculous interest rates in the mid-1980s, every prospect of owning our own homes.

In the 1980s our chief global concern was nuclear Armageddon at the tail end of the cold war. Today the daily threat might be China, Iran or North Korea, with the constant, of course, given the bellicosity and unpredictability of Trump, always America. Many Australian conservatives let slip much about their fears of a Trump White House as the beast roared on its way up – his hatred of women and minorities, his temperamental unsuitability, in short all of the things our children so easily identified and empathetically condemned as they would the schoolyard bully. My daughter and her friends talk of Trump constantly as a present and future threat to their world.

Meanwhile, toxic nationalism, in Australia and elsewhere, is more potent than it has been since the world wars, manifesting here in even greater oppression and marginalisation of Indigenous people, and the political vilification of asylum seekers and their banishment to earthy hell. The militarisation of Australian history and culture continues apace at the expense of gentler, more thoughtful forms of patriotism.

Terrorism was frightening for us, though largely in the abstract – a thing that mostly happened elsewhere, and quite rarely, rather than the global and domestic threat it is for our kids. It did not cross our minds when we boarded a plane, attended a big public event – or walked through a mall in the city.

The early science was there for us on climate change and ozone depletion. Governments needed little convincing of their reality and had begun to act. The change was not deliberately contorted, like today, as a matter of belief (despite the science) that divides politics, media and society – and delivers a status quo of stalemate between enlightenment and darkness that bequeaths to our young bleaching reefs, vanishing species and rising sea levels.

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Some parents go to great lengths to shield their children from the worst realities of the world – war, famine, the threat of global warming, toxic racism, terrorism. We’d never tried – or wanted – to do that. The days have always began and ended in our homes with radio news and current affairs. There have always (until recently) been daily newspapers, and family conversation has inevitably included a fair amount of domestic and geopolitics. We wanted to raise informed, socially and politically engaged, and caring, young people.



We have tried, as parents and as people engaged with the world, who want to make it and this country better, to argue our causes. Some days there are wins. Others, it feels like progress is stuck in a morass beyond our control, at the whim of those at the very top of the power tree.

I inherited a better world, indeed, a better Australia, than my mother and father. But were I gone tomorrow, I doubt my kids would say the same about their parents.

But I’m not done yet – and I heard everything Number Two Daughter said in the car that day. The one thing I did not hear was any hint of fear. She sounded defiant and courageous. But never afraid. Perhaps that’s one of the things we did get right.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist