A few months ago I saw something at once ordinary and novel. A man in his thirties, with a beard, a nose piercing and not one but two tattoo sleeves, struggling to feed a screaming child locked in a papoose, while another screaming child attempted to scale his leg as if it was a climbing wall. Parental struggle? Ordinary. A millennial parent, for that is what this beanie-wearing man surely was? Novel.
Readers might quibble with the notion of generations such as “millennials”, particularly when they are often employed as a lazy journalistic-sociological shorthand. I am almost convinced by the Oxford academic and essayist Noel Annan’s belief that the idea of a generation is a social construct. But I think every generation since the Ancient Greeks has become convinced they are a generation, with common anxieties. I’ve always been struck by the difference in political attitudes between British people born in, say, the 1960s and those born in the 1990s. The young generally have more extreme views on everything from social housing to migration to green energy.
Our cover story this week, written by Kate Mossman, reports on how a generation born in the 1980s is tackling child-rearing in the 2020s. We meet the millennial parent: desperate to raise their children differently to the way their parents raised them, anxious to treat them gently and respectfully, and struggling to wade through a sea of confusing and bizarre online parenting advice. This may be the first time the New Statesman has received a manifesto written entirely in the third person in response to an interview request – courtesy of Jo Frost, aka Supernanny. Let no one say that we are afraid to surprise our readers.
Elsewhere, Tim Wyatt reports on the future of the Church of England ahead of the appointment of the new archbishop of Canterbury. The Church now plausibly resembles the rest of the public sector: struggling with budgets, scandals and a loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the public. Whoever replaces Justin Welby may need more than a benevolent God to work through the Church’s problems. For stress relief, they could do worse than checking out the God-squad running club Elliott Kime discusses in his column.
On 20 August the Israeli government granted approval for construction on “E1”, a small but strategically vital patch of land in the West Bank. Lamorna Ash interviews Hassan Mleihat, a Palestinian Bedouin solicitor in the occupied territory. Mleihat’s days are “consumed by efforts to catalogue the violence going on in the West Bank – heading off in his car, morning or night, as soon as news reaches him of settler attacks against Bedouins”. As the New Statesman went to press, Israel continued to push ahead with a new offensive in Gaza. As with the conflict raging in Ukraine, writes Katie Stallard, there is no end in sight.
In the Back Pages, Finn McRedmond inaugurates our new food column by taking on London’s most “authentic” sandwiches and the men who keep taking photos of them. She still hasn’t paid me back for the chicken escalope I bought her last week, so for this week’s Sketch I forced her to attend the Clacton Air Show with Nigel Farage. Farage’s summer and Labour’s incoming response to his claim that Britain is “broken” are the subject of George Eaton’s politics column.
Freddie Hayward interviews the former chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, the trust-busting Lina Khan; sadly there is no British equivalent to the ferociously smart and tough academic. Nor is there a British equivalent to the sui generis filmmaker Whit Stillman, interviewed by our culture editor, Tanjil Rashid. One of Britain’s most original artists, the novelist Irvine Welsh, has written this week’s Diary.
I returned to the New Statesman in May after a spell at the Sunday Times. It truly is a joy to be back, not only with brilliant colleagues but what must be the sharpest readership in British media. I can fact-check that assertion: I now have access to the letters email inbox. I read every single one and am staggered by their quality, humour and decency. And by how many of you read the magazine while in the bath. Please keep them coming.
Will Lloyd is deputy editor of the New Statesman
[See also: Labour can’t agree on how to fight Farage]
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This article appears in the 27 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Gentle Parent Trap