{"text":[[{"start":4.55,"text":"It feels as if they were only born half an hour ago, but my enormous twin sons are now 17 and preparing (I hope) for the French end-of-school exams, “le bac”. Come September, they should follow their sister to university in the UK, leaving my wife and me in an empty nest in Paris. "}],[{"start":23.150000000000002,"text":"While you’re in the thick of parenthood, it seems eternal. Family life is repetition: the nappies, bedtime stories, football games and thousands of dinners. But as Nicholas Lemann wrote, it’s only a “(long) season of life”, and for us it’s ending. I remember what our cohort of new parents expected from parenthood 20 years ago, when my daughter was born. Instead we were ambushed by reality, which took on forms we hadn’t imagined."}],[{"start":51.05,"text":"My parenting peers in the early 2000s were mostly educated urbanites (commenters, please fill in own epithet), who thought we could shape our children through our individual decisions about parenting. The cohort’s chief metric — inevitably a point of unspoken competition — was hours spent doing childcare. The dominant ambition was to speed children up the educational ladder, teaching them to read aged three, etc. Looking back at that era, just before the financial crisis, there was still a frank admiration for success. People badly wanted their kids to make it. "}],[{"start":86.05,"text":"The first big thing to hit us unawares was the smartphone. I bought one in 2009. A year later, Apple launched the iPad. Suddenly we were dealing with a question we’d never considered: were screens bad for children? Who knew, back then? "}],[{"start":104.4,"text":"I hope I was never obsessed with my children’s achievements, but in any case, our parenting goals changed in 2011 when my wife was diagnosed with cancer. “What are the chances?” we asked the specialist. She did the calculations in front of us. “About 50-50,” she concluded."}],[{"start":123.85000000000001,"text":"My wife and I walked out through the hospital’s medieval courtyard. “Do you think I’ll be OK?” she asked me. I took in her emaciated body, thought, “You’re definitely going to die,” and mumbled some lie. Then she made me tell her my plans for raising the kids if she died."}],[{"start":141.95000000000002,"text":"She didn’t die. Modern medicine is amazing. But from then on, our ambition became simple: both of us staying alive until the boys turned 18. At the time it seemed a daunting goal."}],[{"start":154.60000000000002,"text":"Meanwhile, around the world, beyond our control, childhood was changing. Social media replaced time spent reading and socialising. I don’t blame the kids. If I’d had a smartphone aged 14, I would never have read a book. But collectively, it’s been an educational disaster. "}],[{"start":172.05,"text":"As the educator Michael Strong says (on social media, of course): “If your child becomes a reader, about 80 per cent of the education job is already done . . . Reading is the meta-skill that enables all other skills. History requires reading. Science requires reading. Even math increasingly requires reading.”"}],[{"start":191.15,"text":"Probably linked to social media, but for reasons nobody fully understands, our children’s generation in developed countries experienced a mental-health crisis. We heard stories around us of kids contemplating suicide."}],[{"start":204.85,"text":"Meanwhile, faith in meritocracy was crumbling. The best route into the elite these days seems to be to have parents in the elite. And when I look at most people who reached the top, in business or politics or the Epstein files, I don’t particularly want that for my kids. (Sceptics will dismiss this as carping from someone who didn’t win the glittering prizes, and they may be right.)"}],[{"start":229.35,"text":"I’ve also learnt how little control parents have over children. Looking back 20 years, we underestimated the power of society. We’ve since discovered that collective choices usually trump individual ones. My wife and I didn’t want to give our kids smartphones at 12, but since most socialising and information exchange happened on WhatsApp, we did. If their screen addictions remain modest today, it’s mostly because they grew up in a walkable city with superb public transport. From age 10, they could go out alone to meet friends. If we’d lived in a suburb where they’d needed us to drive them around, they might have spent childhood in their bedrooms on the phone."}],[{"start":267.7,"text":"New parents today are prepared for phones. They learnt from the mistakes of our guinea pig generation. A growing global movement is banning kids from social media, and phones from schools. What is catching today’s parents unawares is AI. "}],[{"start":281.59999999999997,"text":"My ambitions for my children have simplified over time. Now I’d just like them to be happy, sociable, productive members of society, doing enjoyable jobs, and living mostly off-screen. It’s a big ask, but I think they might get there. "}],[{"start":298.09999999999997,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram"}],[{"start":309.5,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1778938327_3780.mp3"}