It's not often I have David Cameron to thank for my first laugh of the day, but there he was first thing, giving me a giggle over my breakfast. "All I want," he told a journalist, "is to be able to see [my children's] Facebook pages."
His daughter Nancy, nine, and younger children Arthur, seven, and Florence, two, will, in time, be allowed to have Facebook pages. The only proviso is that the prime minister is going to monitor them … in the early days, anyway.
It's hard to pinpoint which part of all this was funniest. The idea that Nancy will wait until she's "allowed" to have a Facebook account? The idea that her dad will be able to monitor her pages, even in the early days (or what he thinks are the early days)? Or the idea that our leader is privy to some of the most secret information in the world but will be denied even a peek at the thing he'd most like to see, just like the rest of us parents.
Because they shut us out, Mr Cameron. It's the very point of adolescence, you see: they're learning to live without us, and learning to live without us means going it alone. Having their own life. Having a bit of privacy from the adults who have been hanging around them embarrassingly from their earliest moments, but whom they're at last able to shake off – both in real life and, now the world's gone digital, online.
One thing I realised, as my kids got older, is this. The world is divided into two sorts of parents: those who have children younger than yours, who know nothing; and those who have children older than yours, whose wisdom is incalculable. Twenty years ago, pregnant with my eldest, I met an older cousin at a family party. Our baby was due in June, I told him. "We're hoping that, as it's the summer, it won't change our lives quite so much," I said. "I mean, we'll be able to go out to the pub in the evenings with the pram, and it will somehow seem less of an upheaval."
My cousin laughed – not unkindly, but in a way I now understand is how people who have been there and know so much treat those who simply have no idea what the next round of this adventure called parenting means. "Good luck with that," he said. "For us, having a baby changed everything; I don't think the weather made much of a difference." A few weeks later, when our baby had appeared two months early on a cold spring morning, I remembered what he'd said.
None of us who are further along the path would mock those who are behind us, and who still believe they can control their children in a way we know they won't be able to. We understand, us older and wiser ones, that hoping and believing you're in charge is part of the ultimate double bluff of parenting. It's just too scary to acknowledge the terrifying truth, which is that – from day one – we don't really call the shots, and as time goes on they, our kids, hold more and more of the cards.
But if we don't control them, we sure do influence them. So the thing is, Mr Cameron, you'll never see Nancy's Facebook pages, but everything you've ever shown her as a parental role model will be up there. So – like you in your Bullingdon days, perhaps – she may make some toe-curling judgments and embarrassing mistakes. But show her how to be true and kind; show her that it's not OK to be cruel to people or to bully them; show her that what we have to do as human beings is respect others, wherever we are and whatever we're doing; show her all that, and you won't need to worry about her Facebook pages.
Our values don't unravel online if they're knitted together offline. And when you've passed on the wisdom life has brought you, Mr Cameron, one more word of advice: trust her to get it right. And do you know what? If you trust her, she will.
