Talking about dummies and nappies when you have small children can become something of an obsession. When do you toilet train? When should a child throw their dummy away? Is it a problem if your child sucks their thumb beyond the age of three? Shouldn’t my child be walking by a year, talking by two and wiping his own bum at four?

As long as you don’t get sucked into all of that, there will come a time only a few years later that you can’t even remember any of these milestones because your own child – as well as all the children you know – is walking, talking and wiping his own bum. And I have never seen a sixteen year old sucking a dummy. That child who couldn’t walk till one and half or wipe his bum till five or … shock and horror … sucked a dummy until he was six, will turn into a perfectly well balanced teenager, regardless … or a perfectly unbalanced teenager, regardless.

Take that same sixteen year old who has been having sex for a couple of years already. From the perspective of this great generational change, we could say we are becoming too permissive. Jump forward a decade or two and you will see that that teenager who got everything wrong in terms of milestones has turned into a perfectly well balanced thirty year old.

We all end up in nappies again anyway, someone else wiping our bums and washing our bodies, while we suck on our false teeth. I have a feeling the sex dries up though.

Everything evens out eventually and the key is not to stress over the individual milestones but the individual itself.