Josh is 16. He doesn’t smoke or do drugs and he’s never been blind drunk. At school, he’s popular and hard-working without being geeky. At home, he spends too much time on MSN and his Play-Station, but he practises his saxophone when prompted (he’s just passed grade 6), tells funny jokes and has a delightfully engaging relationship with his parents. Sounds like the perfect teenager? Think again.

Josh is part of a new social phenomenon – the tethered generation.

These are the children who, in the most childcentric time in our history, get on with their parents perhaps too well. Their mothers and fathers are attuned and all-providing. Instructed by numerous manuals, they have striven to raise confident and well-adjusted offspring. The dialogue between parents and teens is more open than it has ever been. The ability to text and e-mail through the school day, the university term, the gap-year trek, serves to enhance the bond.

Predictable clashes remain – untidy bedrooms, unwashed dishes, homework – but many parents are proud to declare that their teen is also their friend. With that friendship, however, comes an emerging fear: have we produced a generation that will not be able to fend for itself?

“My son is quite shockingly attached to me,” says Josh’s mother Caroline, a 42-year-old lawyer. “What worries me is how he is going to make the leap from his comfortable life with us to independence.”

Louise, 48, a communications consultant and mother of three, feels similarly uneasy about her 14-year-old son Luke. “In a way, I would find it easier to deal with a child who was wilfully disobedient. It would give me something to grab on to. What I have is a child who doesn’t appear to understand the realities of life. I can’t seem to impress upon him the importance of knuckling down if he is going to make it in the work-force. His teachers say that desire for achievement has to come from him – meanwhile I feel guilty because I’ve generated his laid-back approach by being too soft.”

To understand the tethered generation – and their well-intentioned but fretful parents – you first have to understand the shifting social patterns of the past four decades. Those now raising teenagers are, in the main, part of Generation X, the section of the population born between 1965 and 1976. Their own parents and grandparents had lived through the deprivation of war – “you don’t know how lucky you are” was a mantra of their upbringing. And yet, in many ways, Generation Xers were not so lucky. During their childhood, divorce became easier and therefore more widespread, their emancipated mothers began experimenting with the “have-it-all” theory, creating the term “latchkey kids”, and meanwhile, the economy went into major recession, with mass unemployment and a three-day week during the 1970s. To succeed, Generation Xers have had to be resilient and adaptable self-starters. The tethered generation are part of Generation Y, also known as the Millennials. Born between 1977 and 1999, their backdrop has been economic boom and a rising stock market. Their families may struggle at times to pay the bills, but still they have no concept of a world without mobile phones and remote-control televisions. No home is complete without a PC – and preferably a laptop for their personal use, too. This has made them technically literate, but also impatient.

They demand instant gratification and more often than not their doting parents let them have it. “Teenagers of today possess a distinct sense of entitlement,” says Suzanne Franks, co-author of the brilliantly titled Get Out of My Life, But First Take Me and Alex into Town. “We want them to feel loved, but we need to stop trying to be so popular. If they become tethered to us then that is our fault.” According to Rob Parsons, author of Teenagers: What Every Parent Has to Know, “You rarely meet a parent who doesn’t want the best for their child. The problem is not that we don’t love them enough, but that we love them too much. We want everything for them – the extra tutors, the holidays, the custom-made ski boots that won’t rub. Instead of saying ‘Go get a Saturday job if you want to go clubbing’, you see parents hand over the money – and then ask their teenagers if they can go clubbing with them. That may appear cute, but it is not good. As parents, you have got to be prepared to take the unpopularity hit.”

How has it come to this? Can parents really be getting it so wrong?

The answer is multilayered, but one thing is apparent: the gut instinct of all parents is to blame themselves. “Ours is a generation of uncertain parents,” says Franks. “We have this sense of not really being in control. We think back to our own childhoods and we know we were more obedient. We didn’t talk to our own parents as boldly as our children talk to us. That comparison can make us feel that we have failed and, to make matters worse, our own parents, if they are still around, endorse that sense of failure.”

But comparing child-rearing between generations is neither helpful nor constructive. Many of the boundaries that existed during the adolescence of Generation X have disappeared. A hard smack is no longer an acceptable answer to disrespectful back-chat. The fear factor that came with physical punishment has gone. This is, surely, a good thing. We want our children to feel empowered, not intimidated. For today’s teenagers, there is no question of being left in the pub car park with a bottle of Coke and a packet of crisps while their parents enjoy a Sunday lunchtime drink. We embrace our children into our social lives and go to Pizza Express instead. “My son knows my friends as well as I do,” says Caroline. “I work long hours, and when I do have spare time, I make the effort to spend it with him. That means not shutting him out when we see friends.”

No one bothered to collect figures for working mothers in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, however, we know that 67 per cent of mothers are in full or part-time employment. Life is busy – too busy.

“Mums tend to get the rough end of that,” says Parsons, who speaks regularly at parenting seminars. “Ask an audience of mothers for one word that sums up how they feel, and the unanimous answer is ‘guilty’. They feel guilty because they are so busy giving their kids what they didn’t have, they sometimes can’t give them what they did have – time.”

“Nannies and au pairs help to get you through the early years,” says Fiona, a fashion buyer and the mother of two teenage daughters, “but just as you think your children are going to be more independent, it is you they need and no one else will do.”

It is a huge shock for many parents – and one that even the most finely tuned time-management skills cannot resolve. “My 15-year-old daughter was calling me at work up to five times a day during the Easter holidays,” says Fiona. “I know she misses me when I am not there, but what do I do? Stop work and become a stalker mum? She doesn’t want that either.”

Symbiotic to the emergence of the tethered generation has been the proliferation of “helicopter parents”. These are the breed who start by fighting their children’s playground battles and go on to “hover” well into adulthood. Many will know couples such as Tony and Cherie Blair, who not only helped to finance their children through university, but bought them flats or houses to live in while they were there.

Such hand-holding may give students a secure start, but it also risks stifling self-reliance. A current advertisement for Citibank suggests that financial planning to pay not only your own children’s school fees, but also “your kids’ kids’ school fees”, which begs the question: at what age might your children then expect to stand on their own two feet?

In America, there are several examples of companies actively involving parents in career planning for their children. Merrill Lynch has held open days at which undergraduates and their parents are invited on to the trading floor before being given lunch. Ernst & Young sends out parent packs.

Charles Macleod, resourcing leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers in London, has observed the trend with interest. “The idea behind it is that there are parents of today’s students who never went to university and had the sort of careers guidance they would want to pass on to their children. These companies can’t get to the students while they are at university because students tend to be pretty disengaged, so instead recruiters are targeting their parents, who might then work on their children during the holidays. What you have to ask is: where is the motivation coming from? The answer is not the students, which is why I hope it is not something that will be taken up here.”

So what is the outlook for the tethered generation? Happily, parents can rest assured that it is not as gloomy as they might have feared.

While child-rearing has evolved, so too has the corporate world. To attract Millennials, companies have had to adjust their thinking. “Once, the employee had to justify the privilege of working for a company. Today we have to justify why talented people should stay with us,” says Macleod. “Millennials own their own skills and abilities and want to go to the place that is giving them the best opportunities. As an employer, we have to emotionally engage with them if we are to retain them.” In many companies, monthly feedback sessions have replaced the starchy annual review process. Bosses no longer talk about individuals’ weaknesses, but of “developmental needs”.

According to Tony Schneider, a human resources consultant who has worked for several multinationals, including AOL and Hilton, the days of the manager who throws a piece of paper across the room and barks “do it again” are numbered. So are curt “not what I wanted” e-mails. “The graduates coming into the employment market don’t thrive on the fear factor. They are used to being mentored and cared for. They don’t respect hierarchy for its own sake. They need to be impressed before they will listen. They expect to be treated with fairness and understanding. And if they don’t get what they want, they are quite prepared to move on.”

This approach works, of course, for as long as the economy remains buoyant and competition for high-calibre graduates remains intense.

“The ones who make out best long term will be those who have the education and confidence, but who can also survive the knocks,” says Schneider. The child who has failed an exam, not been picked for the sports team, who was forced to save up for his own laptop, is less likely to experience panic and denial when he is rejected for promotion.

“The best thing we can do for our teenagers is to back off. Stop mollycoddling them,” says Franks. Parenting is about many things, but ultimately it is about letting go. That much hasn’t changed.

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