Children grow up and leave home. They go from helpless babies to mature adults who have sex and drink beer while your back is turned. The secret is to try and keep pace with them. As they grow you have to back off more and let them do more. You have to resist the urge to do everything for them and let them fry eggs^* or paint dustbins^** for themselves.

It’s a delicate balancing act. You can’t give them more responsibility than they can handle, but at the same time you can’t hold them back. And when you do let them fry eggs or paint dustbins for the first time, they are going to make a mess – yolk on the cooker, paint on the garage floor. It’s the mess that most often makes a parent say, ‘No, you can’t’. But we have to break a few eggs (ha ha) to be able to fry one. We have to gloop a bit of paint if kids are going to be able to carry out any DIY job for themselves when they are grown up.

When they are tiny and learning to drink from a cup for the first time we expect spillage. We stand there with kitchen roll in our hand prepared to mop up. But by the time they are teenagers we’ve forgotten the art of hiding the kitchen roll behind our back waiting for them to spill stuff. We expect them to be able to keep their room tidy first time. But they’ve never done it before. They don’t know how to do it. They have to learn and part of that learning process is doing it badly, doing it differently from how we, as adults, would do it. Our job is to help them. To hand them responsibility slowly, bit by bit, but with guidance.

We expect them to do everything right first time, no spillage, no broken eggs, no paint on the floor. It is our expectations that are unrealistic. Growing up is a messy business.