Kid Gloves

It is almost a cliché. Children today don’t have the independence their parents and grandparents did. Those who walked to school on their own now walk with or drive their kids. “Come home when it gets dark” has been replaced by “Stay home unless Mummy or Daddy is with you.” Risk taking is forbidden, not rewarded; risk aversion has become a universal tendency.

In L’Enfant vieux (The elderly child), Stéphane Kelly attributes the change to an aging population. “In a society that advances in age, a dour tranquility settles in, the citizens retreat to the private sphere, preferring to be sideline observers of a democracy of spectators,” he writes. “Without realizing it, most residents become passive and timid; this process contaminates even the youngest.”

The predictable book — or, at least, what I had expected — would have been a rant on how young people have been cosseted and insulated from the risks and rewards of the world outside the family and...