Yes, your kids must move on...

The traveller has returned. Yes, my firstborn survived several months in Southeast Asia, Southeast Asia survived him, and I survived several months without him.

Now he’s been home six days and it’s lovely to see him, and of course I missed him, but …

The thing is he’s changed – he’s now ready to “get started” with life, as he and his girlfriend like to say, as if everything up to this point has just been practice – but he doesn’t seem to realise that I have changed too.

Mostly, I got over him going, as parents invariably do.

Yes, I cried to see him, and I’ll cry again when he leaves, and I’ll always be craving a hug, but I know I can be perfectly happy with him out there in the world, doing his thing.

Meanwhile I’ll be right here doing my thing too, because while I’ll always be delighted to see him, I’m also delighted that my job is done.

And no sane parent wants their adult child to stay at home forever, sleeping on their childhood bed, surrounded by the faded stuff of their youth, sipping tea and watching game shows with their old folks every evening while life passes them by outside.

I keep thinking back to my school days, to a teacher who still lived with his mum: he was bald and clad in musty brown, and he fiddled with his zip a lot and ate wine gums – and nobody took him seriously at all.

Even then, we knew intrinsically that an adult overstaying their childhood, or their twenties at most, at their parents’ home was a tragedy.

Yet it’s a tragedy now increasingly affecting my children’s generation – the much-maligned millennials – because they simply cannot afford to leave home.

It used to be a given that our children would have more than us – but no longer, because millennials are the only group alive to see a generational decline in pay rates.

In the ’80s, it took on average just three years to save enough for a house deposit; for a millennial, it will take 19.

In the ’60s, folk spent 8% of their income on housing; for my son’s generation it’s 25%.

That he’s ready to “get started” is a miracle of sorts.

Yes, he’ll always have a place with me, but it’s not where he wants to be.

And – whisper it – it’s not where I want him to be either.