Reflect

Thankfully, my boys have only battled rooms with no air con, the occasional jellyfish, and language barriers, rather than Cyclopes and sirens, but anyone who has watched the family location tracker a little too often will empathise with me that waiting for them to return safely can take a toll!

Talking of the classical world, the men’s football World Cup at times felt completely gladiatorial, replete with many heroes and villains, moments of breathtaking resilience and heartbreaking defeat. It could be uplifting one moment and rather shocking the next.

"Who are you supporting tonight then?" became one of the questions of summer 2026, sometimes sparking defensive family debates about loyalty, identity and belonging around dinner tables, at shop counters and in neighbourhoods. No matter which team you supported, you will have likely been in a living room or pub this summer and witnessed audiences erupting with joy at a last-minute goal or heard collective groans when an ‘easy opportunity’ was missed.

Sport can bring out the best and the worst in us. In our house, we morphed into hideously harsh armchair judges, convinced we knew exactly which substitutions should have been made. Referees were frequently declared incompetent or corrupt, and VAR, the Video Assistant Referee, was seen as either a fantastic invention or a conspiratorial tool, depending on which way the decision went.

My favourite bits of the big games involved watching what was caught on camera after the final whistle when exhausted players embraced loved ones in the stands or hugged their children who had run onto the pitch. Those moments reminded me that behind every sporting triumph and talent lies a network of loving supporters and encouragers. It also showed that at moments of joy and vulnerability, we want those who really know us and love us to be present with us. They are an integral part of our journeys.

My favourite World Cup moment was when the Spanish defender Pedro Porro gifted his winner’s medal to his 75-year-old grandfather, who had been his biggest supporter throughout his childhood. The funniest moment for me was when superstar Lamine Yamal's toddler brother was spotted licking the World Cup trophy while Lamine looked affectionately on.

Like many others, I enjoyed watching the Norwegian team and their supporters throughout the tournament, led by Erling Haaland and the way they would come together before games, mimicking the motion of rowing a Viking longship and chanting in unison. Community cohesion at its best.

Not every moment was so unifying. We can all easily think of players who responded to loss with grace, whilst remembering even more vividly those who channelled their disappointment into frightening displays of physical aggression against their opponents. These incidents serve as reminders that while we cannot always control the outcome, we can choose our response and how we respond tends to live long in others’ memories. In my view, those moments of lost self-control and poor judgement eclipsed the talents and qualities that brought those players to the world's biggest stage.

Motivate

The Eton Journal for Innovation and Research in Education once devoted an entire issue to character education, and one particularly memorable essay by a Head of Physical Education in a school argued that sport builds character only when adults stop treating the result as the point. His pupils, he wrote, are not protected from losing. They are taught instead to measure themselves against whether they played well, so that winning becomes “the icing on the cake” when they have, and “a crumb of consolation” when they have not. He was blunt that a team could play its very best and still lose, because winning is rarely something any of us fully controls. Once a young person grasps that, he argued, the scoreboard loses some of its power over them.

Nobody needs a qualification to teach character. As parents we are teaching it already, every day, simply because our children are watching. After a sports event or match, it is about the way we might talk about the referee on the drive home or the language we use when a match has been lost.

To develop character, we also need to consider what really matters to us. Can we name what we admire instead of praising our children in general terms; telling our child that what they did was generous, or that it took real self-control?

There are other ways we can cultivate character within family life, and they begin with what we choose to expose our children to. Homer’s Odyssey has been much on my mind this summer, with the new film adaptation arriving onto cinema screens, and it turns out to have a good deal to say on the subject. We tend to remember it as Odysseus’s story, but his son Telemachus has a significant journey of his own. Athena, appearing to him first as Mentes and later taking the form of the old family friend Mentor, urges him to leave the safety of home and seek news of his father.

It is from Mentor’s name, later associated especially with the role of a wise guide, that we get our word ‘mentor’. The suggestion I took from the story is that the wise adult does not simply shelter the young person but helps send them out into the world. If we are determined to be overly protective, how can our children possibly discover what they are capable of? If we don’t encourage participation in life’s activities, or steer them away from any form of competition, how will they ever learn what victory or loss feels like, and, importantly, how to navigate them?

Shielding children and young people from all forms of negative experience entirely isn’t really a recipe for growth and resilience; it is a way of ‘keeping them on the island’. Far better to encourage little odysseys of their own; the school trip, the sleepover, the solo bus journey into town; small voyages out and safely back again, from which they return knowing a little more about what they are made of. Our children need these voyages, because much of what they will learn about themselves can only be learnt out of our sight.

None of this is easy of course. Letting a child go is far harder than keeping them close, and I write that as someone who spent much of this summer consulting the family location tracker rather more often than was strictly necessary.

Support

This summer gave our children some genuinely useful role models on the business of looking after yourself. Several of these players talk openly about their preparation, and what is striking is how ordinary most of it turns out to be. I was delighted to hear Erling Haaland say that he thinks sleep is the most important thing in the world, and that he strives for nine or ten hours of it. He shuts out the signals in his bedroom and starts his day with daylight and a short walk in fresh air. He is careful about what he eats and says consistency of effort is key.

For a teenager who believes that success is a matter of raw talent, or of a heroic effort the night before, there is something quietly subversive about one of the best players in the world explaining that his edge is a consistent bedtime, decent food and a morning stroll! It chimes with a book I have been reading this summer, The Odyssey Mindset by the clinical psychologist Dr Sam Akbar, which makes much the same case about resilience. It is rarely a heroic quality summoned in a crisis, but something built quietly and in advance, by the way we choose to live on the ordinary days.

As we prepare for another academic year, many of our children are setting out on new and exciting journeys of their own. Some will be taking their first tentative steps into nursery or reception. Others are moving up to primary or secondary school, and a few are setting off for university. None of us knows quite what lies ahead and that can feel a little nerve-wracking, but the truth is experiencing that is an important part of growth and learning. Change can be unsettling simply because it is unclear and uncertain. What steadies children through it is an anchor at home: predictable routines, consistency in how we respond, a clear sense of what our family values, and the certainty that they are loved regardless of how the term goes. Children who feel anchored in that way tend to navigate change far more easily, because the ground beneath them is not moving even when everything else is.

Our role, whether as parents, teachers or friends, is not to remove every obstacle from the journey. We cannot calm every storm or chart every course. Instead, we seek to provide safe harbours: places of security, encouragement and unconditional support where young people know they are welcomed, valued and able to begin again when things have not gone to plan.

That thought stayed with me all summer. Dr Akbar argues that Homer's ancient poem is not simply a story about a Greek hero trying to find his way home. It is a story about what it means to be human. Each of us, she suggests, moves through cycles of change, opportunity, challenge, uncertainty and, hopefully, growth. We needn't have fought beneath the walls of Troy or spent ten years lost at sea to recognise ourselves in Odysseus. Every family, in its own way, is navigating an odyssey.

Mine will be back together shortly. The tracker tells me that one son is at the airport terminal and the other one is at a train station in Barcelona, and within the week there will be washing in the hall and stories told over supper. Penelope waited twenty years for hers, so I can hardly complain, and the waiting has taught me something all the same. We are not meant to keep the people we love safely on the island. We are meant to make the harbour worth coming back to.