It’s bad enough having your private texts splashed all over the news. It’s worse having a load of middle-aged columnists judging you for your ‘immature’ responses.

It seems that all anyone’s talking about in the wake of the Chris Huhne saga is the admittedly rather upsetting exchange between him and his son Peter. In it, Peter criticises his father’s behaviour, calling him ’a pathetic loser and a joke’, and repeatedly telling him to ‘F*** off’.

The language Peter uses is probably unnecessary. The sentiment it expresses must not be undermined.

The texts have been portrayed as one man’s valiant effort to stay in touch with an ungrateful and immature kid. The fact that commentators are willing to put Chris Huhne’s parenting on a pedestal - David Baddiel recently described it as ‘impeccable’ - demonstrates a fundamental flaw in the way in which we view relationships between parents and young adults.

There is no doubt that maintaining a relationship with your parents is important. Right from the start, parents are a child’s basic unit of support; their teachers, their carers, and their friends. Nor does this relationship diminish in importance as the child becomes a young adult. If anything, young adults are all the more in need of someone upon whom they can depend, as their place in the world changes. This is precisely why the relationship needs to be respected by both parties. And the parental relationship, like any other, is based entirely on trust.

Bar the odd bit of made-up science when kids are going through that questioning phase, young people have to be able to trust that their parents are habitually telling them the truth - and vice versa. Both parties have to know that the other won’t just run off and leave them. Both have to know that the other person acts consistently with their feelings in mind.

People fail at this, of course they do. Sometimes repeatedly, sometimes dramatically. After which you apologise to the other party, and make an effort to change your behaviour. The most important thing is not to be perfect, but to maintain that mutual trust at the heart of the relationship. 

The idea that anyone should accept less than this from any relationship is totally unfair. No parent would accept consistently dishonest and unreliable behaviour from their children. And yet this acceptance is precisely what people expect from Peter Huhne. This is precisely what is expected from young people time and time again, when we are told ‘Whatever he does, he’ll always be your dad‘. This is not good enough. In fact, it’s pure hypocrisy. Perhaps Peter’s anger was largely to do with being asked to put up with his father’s perceived right, as a parent, to ask for faithfulness and loyalty but not to have to give it in return.

As much as certain factions of the Conservative Party might argue to the contrary, the myth of the importance of the nuclear family structure cannot be maintained. Slowly we are coming round to the idea that two parents of different genders are not essential to a child’s happiness. Gay couples are finally being given the right to adopt. More and more women are bringing children up on their own, often with great success.

As part of this, we must not allow the relationship between parents and young adults to be based on that redundant idea of the nuclear hierarchy; the dominance of the parents and the loyalty of the children. Such expectations are unjust and potentially damaging. Young people must have the right to be angry with their parents. They must have the right to demand from them the behaviour they deserve.

If Huhne wanted a relationship with his son, good parenting might have been to have listened to Peter’s actual complaints, and change his behaviour accordingly. Or perhaps all that was needed all along was a sincere apology for having let his son down. After all sometimes young people aren’t angry; they’re just disappointed.