We had expected him to grasp this opportunity - the only time in his life when he would have 15 uncommitted months - to travel, as he had always said he would do. He spent a few weeks in France picking grapes, then mooched around at home before finally, after six months, letting his grandfather get him a job in an office. An office, for God's sake! One day we were, as usual, bitching about him, when I heard my own voice, and it was my mother's, all those years ago, sounding off about me: the disappointment, the impatience, the insistence on doing it her way.I wrote him a letter, immediately, saying I was sorry. I said I was sure he had a good reason for his decisions and perhaps he would have managed to explain if only we had listened. He, bless him, had more guts than me, and rang as soon as he read it. Of course, he had a reason for wanting to stay at home: his first important relationship, a far more significant exploration than going trekking to Kathmandu We had thought he was taciturn, evasive and lazy. In retrospect, the failure to communicate was entirely ours.We would like to be seen by our children, family and friends as loving and capable, knowledgeable and authoritative. We would like to think that our children trust us and talk to us The reality is often very different.

The vast majority of parents flounder around in a morass of self-recrimination and confusion, feeling left out and ignored We feel incompetent, inadequate and uniquely bad at the job. It's either that, or that we have singularly evil children who are set on humiliating us and breaking our hearts.Teens are always saying to parents that they "just don't listen"; parents say the same thing to teens And, much of the time, they're right. Both groups do find it difficult to explain what they want, what they need and what they are thinking. But the myth that underpins this difficulty is that parenting and communicating are arts with which we are all instinctively endowed. You bear the kids, you get the skills - they come with the package.But they don't. We learn parenting from our parents, just as they learned it from theirs - and so on. What if somewhere along this line there was an adult whose legacy in the art of parenting was destructive?When I talked to parents in preparation for writing my book, what emerged strongly was that it isn't just lack of information or good role models that prevents us from parenting in the way we would wish.

There are other, more subtle, more effective and more dangerous barriers. But the driving force behind self-evolution is as transparent as can be. Parents have always wanted to give their children all possible advantages in life, and what could be more advantageous than increased mental abilities? How much money will that be worth? Certainly as much as an education at an American Ivy League university, which now runs to more than $100,000. But if our Homo erectus ancestors had the ability, they probably would have thought the same thing, 1.5 million years ago Since that time, the human brain has doubled in size.

Why then can't we evolve even further in this direction? It won't happen "naturally". The most important evolutionary consequence of civilisation is that greater intelligence - no matter what its root basis - does not lead a person to have more children. And it's only those genes that increase reproductive output that are "naturally" selected. Thus, the natural evolution of intelligence has come to a grinding halt.Nevertheless some are convinced that further evolution of our minds will occur It's just the driving force that will be different. Instead of evolving naturally, the present-day human species is on the verge of being self-evolving. On earth alone, we have five billion years left before the sun burns out.

Can anyone really believe we will never learn how to enhance mental capacity when the technology is practically at our doorsteps today?Of course, just because something can be done does not mean that it will be done. This is not to say there aren't sometimes unintended negative consequences of attempts to improve the human condition. Of course there are, and there always will be.However, the 20th century has witnessed a series of biomedical advances that have greatly improved human health and increased longevity. The ultimate frontier for genetic enhancement will be the human mind. It is in this realm that many claim we cannot advance, for we are exactly what God intended us to be.