The provocation is right there in the title: There’s No Such Thing as Naughty. That was the first parenting book written by the former BBC news presenter Kate Silverton in her new life as a counsellor for children’s mental health. It became a lockdown bestseller and established Silverton as the scourge of the naughty step, time-outs or indeed any kind of child punishment. At the publication of her new book, she rails against the overdiagnosis of ADHD as well as firm-hand strictness on every level, including the trend for increasingly regimented discipline in British schools. Or in other words, in the child-rearing culture wars, it’s game on.
“In the same way that we don’t punish a child for getting their maths or their spelling
