There is no right time for children

There are two types of parents: those who have children early and those who become mothers and fathers late. The two groups do not differ in terms of disposition and personality, but they experience something fundamentally different. We belong to the first group. I became a father at a time when I was still being asked for ID in clubs and being addressed by postmen.

We were so young that the nursery school teacher asked our son if he had been brought by his older brother when I dropped him off at the door. And today, when I walk through the city with my teenage daughter, her colleagues think I'm her new boyfriend from a distance. That's how young we are.

Like everything in life, becoming a young parent has certain advantages and certain disadvantages. One of the advantages is that you can simply shake off a sleepless night like a criminal shakes off his pursuers in a thriller. And because you haven't read any advice books or parenting blogs, you are pleasantly unaware of all the things you can (and will) do wrong. Youth also goes hand in hand with a certain affinity for risk, which automatically protects you from helicopter behaviour and over-identification with your offspring. To put it in counselling terms: you live more and worry less.

But I don't want to hide the fact that there are also disadvantages to having children early, because it's not easy to teach little people how to live when you don't yet know what you want from life. And so the child often gets in the way of your own life. You want to pump all your energy into work, nightlife or love life, depending on the situation, but instead you're stuck in an emergency because your little one has had a pseudo-croup attack. You are also terribly alone with everything because your social environment does not yet have children.

The pros and cons roughly balance each other out, so I'm tempted to say: there's no right time to have children, it's always the wrong time, so why not now?

And yet there are moments when I am glad to have been early.

Whenever we have friends visiting who have younger children of their own and they bring them along, I wait for the moment when the child - often called Paul or Chloé, Liam or Noé - starts to sabotage the situation. Some children, for example, demand that everyone present watch the «trick» they have «rehearsed», others want to go home after 30 minutes, others take advantage of the moment, binge-watch four hours of Netflix and then stumble into the group completely over-excited and have a nervous breakdown in their parents' lap. I always exchange a meaningful look with my wife.

Seeing parents with children is a reminder that everything passes. The beautiful unfortunately, the bad fortunately.