The thing with the children: A preliminary assessment

I'm at a point in my life where, if you'll forgive the image, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. My children are now 17 and 12, which means that the worst is behind me. Their education is largely complete, there's not much more I can teach them now, and if I do try, they'll roll their eyes in disapproval. I can only hope that they have taken something away from what seemed important to me. Hope that I held their hand at the right moments and let go of it at the right moments.

The two of them are slowly but surely moving away from me, and sometimes I feel like I'm only now realising a little more clearly what has actually been going on over the last few years. So this will be a preliminary summary of what I have learnt.

In the eye of the hurricane

My predominant feeling as a father was that I was stuck in a great but too demanding job, overwhelmed by the burden of having to do everything and not being able to do anything right. You were constantly in the middle of a never-ending hurricane, and as soon as it died down, you forgot about it because the next one was already looming.

Having children is super slow motion and fast forward in one: when you have to deal with tantrums, play with wooden animals or squat in overcrowded emergency room waiting rooms, seconds turn into a viscous unit of lead and tar.

The days are long, but the years are short. So enjoy the minutes that seem like hours.

At the same time, time is racing: one minute the little ones can't walk, the next they're rolling joints. Only afterwards do you realise that the following formula applies with children: the days are long, but the years are short. So savour the minutes that seem like hours.

Did I say earlier that the children are moving away from me? That's not quite true, they are moving away from us. Because I was lucky enough in life not to bring up the children alone. Not that it's impossible, I actually had an excellent role model in my mum. But it's easier to share the cooking and the tidying up, the despair and the madness, the sparkle and the happiness.

And there weren't just the two of us either. There were also grandparents, uncles and aunts, a crazy and delightful babysitter, teachers, neighbours and friends. They were all part of our children's frame of reference. All of them, not us, were responsible for raising our children. To believe that you alone know what is best for your child is presumptuous. In fact, I believe the opposite is true: the more trusted caregivers a child has, the more likely it is to have one that suits it.

We became parents at a time when we were still travelling ourselves. We didn't know where we were going. And because it's difficult to show others how to live when you don't know what you want from life yourself, we didn't have much to offer our children apart from youthful energy and love.

No return

The thing about children is that you can't press Ctrl + Z anymore. You can't go back and change a few things in your life. You get older in one fell swoop. Everything changes. Everything becomes binding. There are good things about that. Self-centredness diminishes. Overnight, you learn what it means to take responsibility and also what it means to bear it. And that this is one of the most beautiful things. And the hardest. Another thing about the right time: it never really fits. Why not now?

Despite our now almost 18 years of experience as parents, I wouldn't describe us as «experienced», because experience somehow presupposes that you have learnt something from it. In fact, I don't feel like I can give anyone any tips or have gained any reliable insights.

The more honestly I talk to other parents, the more I suspect that nobody really knows how it works with children.

We were young and clueless and somehow tried to make the best of it. And wasn't that the case for everyone? The more honestly I talk to other parents, including my own, the more I suspect that nobody really knows how it works with children. Nobody knows the right balance between love and strictness. Nobody knows how to turn irritation into calmness, worry into trust and harshness into clarity. And least of all do those who tell you with great certainty what is right.

Today I think that the opposite is always true in education. There is so much talk about children. About the right diet, the right educational concept, the right school and the right approach to social media. But is it an honest discussion?

The feeling of deep despair

There is little room for concessions. You rarely hear that perhaps not everything always runs smoothly, that not all the feelings you have for your children, no matter how much you love them, are always exclusively positive. Not to mention the pressure you feel to do everything right. We don't talk about it. Yet the feeling of deep despair when raising your own children is one of the most universal experiences of being human.

When I write about my children and my experience as a father, I also have to write about love. It is one of the most impressive things I have ever experienced: that I love my children so much. And something strange happens when I love my children: all the big things - freedom, recognition, career, romance, self-determination - that so dominate my life suddenly become insignificant and small. And the small, the everyday, the supposedly unmanly - i.e. changing nappies, doing the shopping, folding the laundry, admitting weaknesses, reporting defeats - becomes important and big.

There is a person who needs you more than you need them. A person who can't be without you. Käthe Kollwitz, an artist from the 1920s, once said about the parent-child relationship: "The love from the parents to the children is always stronger than the other way round.

It is one of nature's most intelligent arrangements: children receive - in the best case - what they need most, unconditional love, and can still mature into independence because they do not have to provide anything in return, i.e. they are not bound to their parents by their love. If the children also loved their parents in this way, they would not be able to build their own independent lives.

Children are not there to give our lives stability or even meaning.

Even if it often hurts that the children do things differently than you had imagined, if they don't relate to you as much (anymore) or even turn away, this is exactly what is needed. This is exactly what it takes for people to become someone of their own.

Here is perhaps the only really tangible realisation I have come to: As parents, we cannot demand the same love from our children as we are willing to give them. Children are not a project. They are not there to give our lives stability or even meaning.

We do not owe our children perfect behaviour

This means that we have to practise the idea that we as parents will not receive any significant reward for our work. Our children owe us nothing. In the end, we can only take stock ourselves and then perhaps have to admit to ourselves that we were desperately waiting for our reward and manoeuvred ourselves into bitter dependence on our own needs. Worse still, we have also put our children in a difficult situation through over-mothering, excessive father expectations or rigid values.

But how can we avoid being a slave to our own neediness? In a world where so many people have no clarity about their own needs? I don't know. I only know that this requires a high degree of self-knowledge. And that we don't owe ourselves, our children and in fact all the people we relate to perfect behaviour, but we do owe ourselves a sincere effort to know ourselves.

Being parents without having children

Finally, this: After almost 18 years of parenthood, I sometimes ask myself: could I have imagined a life without children? Yes. Not without my children, but without children. Having children fulfils your life, but you don't need your own to have a fulfilled life.

I got this idea from the wonderful Canadian author Sheila Heti, who writes about the (difficult) decision in favour of or against having children in her novel «Motherhood» . At the end of the agonising on the one hand and on the other, she comes to the simple and beautiful realisation that you don't have to become a mother to be a mother. «The whole world wants to be mothered,» she writes, and continues: «Everywhere there are existences and obligations that are just crying out for a mother. You could be that mum.» Her point is that there are so many children, so much to do, so much life to affirm, so much love to give. You don't have to have biological children to live out feelings of motherhood, or more precisely: feelings of parenthood.

You can adopt, but you can also look after neighbourhood children, take on sponsorships, dedicate yourself to apprentices. After all, adults are nothing more than former children; they also need help and feedback, encouragement and boundaries, guardrails and role models.

When I was new to my job, I had a boss who defended her employees - including me - like a mother lion against the outside world, but who also eyed us with incredible rigour and didn't let us get away with anything, absolutely nothing. She had no children, and yet she brought me and us up to be better journalists. Better people. She had no children, but she was a mother.

I am at a point in my life where my children are slowly outgrowing me. They are getting bigger and bigger, and so are their wishes, their plans, their worries - and my helplessness. And as my influence on them dwindles, so does my love for them.