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How could I forget that at this juncture — approaching my GCSE year — my parents were despairing at me, their youngest son, the third of four children.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with that boy,” they would frequently lament, “He just won’t get on.”

In the end, I achieved a few reasonable GCSEs, making the most of study leave away from school, where I didn’t fit in. But that was hardly the end of my parents’ despair.

They must have been equally despairing over a decade later when, despite two degrees, they found me working in a café in Mayfair, not far from my father’s executive club.

You might think all these experiences might make me best placed to guide our son through his own academic and social tumult, but instead, I find myself completely ill-equipped to deal with any of it.

We grew up in an age before the distractions of the web, where if you wanted trouble, you had to actively make the effort to find it. Now, every vice seems to be just a button press away.

If our parents worried we might take to secretly smoking tea bags, we have to contend with the likelihood that our kids have already inhaled vapes spiked with Spice or THC, all wrapped up in a fruity flavour.

As for what their eyes have seen, sometimes I think the less you know, the better. If we thought we were protecting the innocence of our children at home by limiting unbridled access to the web, it turns out it was probably futile.

It might be said that I eventually got my life in order, many years after my siblings and peers settled into professional careers. Through frugal living, we’ve arrived at a level of comfort hard to have imagined just a few years ago.

Sitting here in a house we built with views across the Black Sea, our kids probably can’t even imagine the regrets I have, or the long road to this point. Perhaps they see it as the natural conclusion of my job pressing buttons all day.

I don’t see it that way, though. Do I truly deserve my salary? I don’t credit myself for any of these blessings. Whatever we have achieved has only been by the mercy and generosity of the One, upon whom we all depend.

How could I articulate any of this to our children, already far too materialist to contemplate anything of the metaphysical realm that has come to life in our own lives?

Whenever we nod to things we have seen, they respond with dismissive eyes, shaking their heads at our foolishness, writing it off as pure make-believe.

Is the best we can do to plant a seed, which they may one day be tempted to test? Thus do we recall that most famous Hadith Qudsi aloud:

“Whoever comes to Me walking, I will come to him running.”

I know that my parents and grandparents entrusted me to God, in the end, when nothing else seemed to help. My destination probably wasn’t what they had in mind, but they came to respect me for it nonetheless.

For our own children, I suppose only the same course of action will be fruitful. We can spend a fortune on tuition all we like, but ultimately, every soul has to make up their own mind as to how they will live their lives.

If the Most Merciful wills, it will be the same for our youngest son. We’ll just have to be patient, like my parents were, bumpy ride or not.

And whatever you have, it is from God.