"You've got a while until they start to cause you trouble, then," I said, smiling at the thought. I didn't remember my earlier childhood too well, and surely it would have been quite different to Emily and Rosie's, but I spent enough time volunteering with children to know there was a point where they'd reached their independence, start driving their father mad. I didn't know much about it firsthand, of course, fathers and their daughters (I hadn't had one, obviously) but I'd read about it a lot, in books like the one in my hand, and observed enough to think the statement was apt.