The childhood dream and its shattering. It happened to all of us.
Do you know what a small child absolutely must have in the first years?
Not toys, not perfect nutrition, not even educational programmes teaching him the correct values.
He must know that it will be all right.
Discovering the world can be fascinating, but also thoroughly frightening.
When you are a child, you perceive dimly that there is darkness beyond the door. There is pain, and question marks, and loneliness, and even violence and malevolent forces with destructive potential.
But when the course of childhood is normal — and most households are normal, despite the modern tendency to emphasise the exceptions — that darkness does not really trouble you.
Because you know there is a mother and a father.
And they will protect you.
Until they can no longer.
Towards adolescence, you begin to notice the failures.
As you charge towards your teens, you notice all the holes in the parental performance, all the occasions on which your mother said it will be all right and actually meant I do not know.
Your parents will not rescue you when the exam mark drops. Your parents will not manage to prevent the insult thrown at you in the playground.
My mother and father did not protect me when she broke my heart at sixteen. It genuinely hurt.
And here is the part worth saying to parents, because it inverts the usual anxiety.
That disappointment is not a failure of your parenting. It is the delivery mechanism of the most important thing you will ever transmit — the discovery that the world is not underwritten, arriving gradually, while there is still somebody in the house to absorb it.
A child who never watches his parents fail at something will meet that discovery later, alone, and at full strength.