There are a great many things to dislike about modern parenting trends – take your pick from helicopter to snowplow to Fafo – but the least appealing, perhaps, is the temptation present in all of them to treat raising a child like an extended school project.

The latest addition is something called 18 summers, in which clingy parents count down the school holidays they have left with their children before they leave home, pre-grieving the end as they go. There is no quicker way to ruin something than by filtering it through an internet trend, but this one is particularly insidious: an invitation to inject weird notes of anxiety into what might otherwise be an unstudied thing.

Let’s put to one side for a moment the fact that, in these economic times, kids don’t stop going on holiday with their parents until they’re roughly 35. The idea behind the “viral concept” of 18 summers – tagline “you only get 18 summers with your kid” – is to remind us that life is short and we should cherish each moment, a banality that, if it is ever true, is particularly untrue during the summer holidays, which are very, very long indeed. I would rather sign up to a movement called 18 minutes, in which we........

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