So I was watching 'Jungle Junction' on Disney TV this morning (don't ask....sometimes it's Mickey Mouse Clubhouse - the thrill of anticipation is what gets me out of bed each day!) and the zebra-with-the-enormous-spectacles found an amazing pink and purple flower with zooty orange stripes (an object of rare beauty in Jungle Junction Land, let me tell you!) which, to her horror, kept disappearing just when she'd fetched the locals to admire her discovery. Of course, I figured out it was a butterfly and not a flower LONG before the cute pink-pig-on-wheels and his faithful fellow flower hunter, the mauve elephant-also-on-wheels, did but as I am roughly a half-century older than the target audience I guess I shouldn't hold my breath for the accolades. The thing is - and there IS a point to these humiliating revelations about my prime-time viewing - the butterfly could not be contained but needed the freedom to fly from flower to flower, doing whatever butterflies do to keep the planet's plant ecology in business. To imprison it would, at best, prevent it from fulfilling its unique purpose and, at worst, destroy it. I know this because when I was about 9 years old I kept a praying mantis (Yes, I did. His name was 'Manty' and I loved that six-legged sucker) in a carefully perforated shoe-box, which I filled with all his favourite leaves. Despite all the love I lavished on him, both leaves and Manty shrivelled up and died within a shockingly short space of time, leaving me desolate and with a nagging suspicion that I might just have screwed up somewhere.

When I was a teenager (long before FB, Twitter and Instagram took the mystery out of adolescent romance) there was a popular mantra that went something along the lines of 'If you love him, set him free - if he returns, he's yours. If he doesn't, he never was'. Lame as the legendary crippled snake and about as trite as 'Love means never having to say you're sorry' (Erich Segal, WHAT were you thinking??) but it softened the blow of rejection for a whole generation of teenage girls when we were dumped (again) by the fickle flirts of the sterner sex. But, as with most cliches, there is an element of truth floundering in all that saccharine syrup: it is never a good idea to keep anyone or thing imprisoned (other than serial human rights abusers and the like, of course.) Even when the prison bars are made of love.

Which brings me to the perennial problem of parenting: how do you let someone whom you love more than life itself go - to the end of the road on a rickety tricycle... to the school disco with a toad that you KNOW is going to break his or her heart... to boarding school....to university in another city... to work in a foreign land... to live, in love, with another person who is now more essential to his or her happiness than you are...to set him or her free to soar (or crash) and wave bravely from the sidelines? 

The answer lies in the flip-side of the same emotion that makes us yearn to keep them safe, if stifled, in a soft cocoon: love, only this time the selfless variety. A successful parent is no longer needed but still wanted - and the only way to achieve that is to first let them fly free. 

Sjoe! So much deep-speak from one episode of Jungle Junction. Just think what profound philosophical truths might be gleaned from the antics of a certain Purple Dinosaur!

Watch this space...