My poor blog has been seriously neglected lately. My last post was for Zero Waste Week 2022 and any spare time I’ve had for writing since then has been used for freelance writing projects (I’ve written some articles for Teach Early Years magazine that you can see online here and here) and plodding on with my ever diminishing dream of becoming a children’s fiction writer. However, yesterday morning I was thinking about this post I wrote five years ago when our eldest daughter started secondary school and how much has changed since then.

In the summer, our eldest daughter left secondary school and our youngest child left primary school. In amongst the busyness of his SATs week and the stress of her GCSE exams came the flurry of prom preparations. Exams done, leavers’ day celebrations followed with shirt signing, meals out and the long-awaited prom. We said goodbye to being primary school parents at an emotional leavers’ assembly. During the summer holidays, our eldest daughter spent a week in Bulgaria with her boyfriend and his family, flying solo there and back. When I look back at the concerns I had in the 2018 blog post, they seem really insignificant compared to allowing our 16-year-old daughter to fly solo!

And since September, she has started sixth form college; working out transport, making new friends, juggling college and social life, tackling the increase in complexity of her chosen subjects with determination. And, of course, our youngest has faced the same challenges starting secondary school; getting the school bus with our youngest daughter, making new friends and navigating a new school building and routine.

Since that post five years ago, as parents we have negotiated so many parenting hurdles and decisions. Each one at the time seeming so momentous, only to be replaced with even bigger decisions down the line. Do we allow our children to have sleepovers at houses where we haven’t met the parents? What age should they be getting public transport alone? How long do you leave it before panicking when your child isn’t answering their phone? Treading the line between allowing independence and protecting our children is akin to walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. We haven’t always done the best job but we’re immensely proud of the way our children conduct themselves and are so independent and capable. And they know we’re always here for them when they need help or advice.

Half a term into this school year, knowing now how quickly time moves, we need to start thinking about where our youngest daughter (currently Year 10) will go when she finishes school. Our eldest would like to go to university so we also need to start putting some thought into attending university open days. All of a sudden, after all these years of blogging about the ups and downs of parenting young children, the time when they leave home seems to be approaching like a freight train. All those people who told us to make the most of them being little because it goes so fast were right. And now I pass that same advice on to friends and colleagues with small children.

This isn’t a sad blog post by any means. We look back with fondness at all the times we allowed them to sleep on our chests or the stories we read over and over and over again. We have no regrets about co-sleeping because we knew it wouldn’t last forever and we just made the most of those fierce toddler cuddles. We’re loving watching our children grow into amazing young people and can’t wait to see what they do with their lives. My lovely Grandad Jack used to joke that children stopped being troublesome around 30. They might be getting bigger at an alarming rate, but they’ll still need us for a while longer!