It feels as if they were only born half an hour ago, but my enormous twin sons are now 17 and preparing (I hope) for the French end-of-school exams, “le bac”. Come September, they should follow their sister to university in the UK, leaving my wife and me in an empty nest in Paris.
While you’re in the thick of parenthood, it seems eternal. Family life is repetition: the nappies, bedtime stories, football games and thousands of dinners. But as Nicholas Lemann wrote, it’s only a “(long) season of life”, and for us it’s ending. I remember what our cohort of new parents expected from parenthood 20 years ago, when my daughter was born. Instead we were ambushed by reality, which took on forms we hadn’t imagined.
My parenting peers in the early 2000s were mostly educated urbanites (commenters, please fill in own epithet), who thought we could shape our children through our individual decisions about parenting. The cohort’s chief metric — inevitably a point of unspoken competition — was hours spent doing childcare. The dominant ambition was to speed children up the educational ladder, teaching them to read aged three, etc. Looking back at that era, just before the financial crisis, there was still a frank admiration for success. People badly wanted their kids to make it.