The day I typed “calculate distance from roof to pool” into Chat GPT, I knew my parental catastrophising was getting out of control. My worries about my 18-year-old son’s love of back flips had prompted me to Google the floor plan of the Spanish villa he and his friends had booked for a post A-Level celebration: his first mates’ holiday.
I hoped it would reassure me that the pool was too far from the roof for high-altitude flips. It didn’t. In that moment, I had to accept my disaster planning was a distraction from the realisation I was finally in the “low control” stage of the parenting years. The bit where, even though I still felt it was my job to keep my daredevil son safe, it was better to step back and give him the confidence and freedom to do that himself.
This is a tricky line to tread during the post-exam summer weeks we’re in right now. Excited 16 to 18-year-olds are desperate for independence, just after being released from the stress of school into the wild. There are parties, proms, festivals, gap years, mates’ holidays, interrailing, pubs, clubs, romantic sleepovers, adventures in cars and fake IDs to plan and experience. It looks like a Pandora’s box of rebellion and potential death traps to us parents, but to our young people, it is the joyous wave of freedom and new fun for which they have waited years.
