the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

As a parent you have the benefit of having been a child, and you will have lived through having a father (OK, I know that some will not have had one at home). As a father you have no experience of doing the job yourself until the need arrives.

There is an assumption that there will have been things that your father did that you did not like, and so you may, instinctively, avoid these. You do your best to bring your children up in the best way as you see it, but there is a fundamental flaw in that logic.

Your children are not you. You may have been involved in their production, and they may look like you and have some characteristics in common, but they are from another generation (and, perhaps, from a different planet). To assume that what may, or may not, have been important to you as a child is not, necessarily, going to help you.

Each generation is programmed to reject the world of the generation before. This is the generation gap and may well have had some impact on how you got on with your own parents. It’s a fact of life, and should help us progress as a race.

I had a distant relationship with my father. In the way that things develop, I was more my mother’s boy and my younger sister was daddy’s girl. Dad and I did communicate, but not much, and I felt guilty when, many years after his death, I found that I had a half-brother, Jim, who dad had abandoned when he was very young. He had been searching for news of his father for many years. Dad died when I was in my mid-twenties; Jim never knew him, nor, despite having him my life for that long, didn’t really know him either.

Did that distance influence my relationship with my own children? Probably, but I tried to be closer to my children, and, unlike dad, kept in touch with mine even after I left their mother. That I have little contact with one, and none with the other, is another thing, but I wanted to try and give mine space to develop in their own way. I gave them counsel when asked, but never tried to run their lives.

I hasn’t worked out too badly: My daughter works for the NHS and is part of the team at Oxford who carried out the first womb transplant, and my son, despite health issues that could see him gone before me, now runs his own business. Both are now in their forties. Oddly, I have a closer relationship with my step-daughter, and we are so alike in many ways that we could be biologically related.She lives in Australia, so most of our contact is via video calls.

I am a great grandfather these days, and have not too many years to go before I shuffle off. I don’t think that I have been a great father and, anyway, my opinion does not matter. My assorted children are out there and are part of the future, al I can really claim is to have played a part in producing them.