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6.The more you do for your children when they are older,
more you impede their own independent progress. Love is turning them loose, not providing for their every need. Life is a series of lessons from experiencing failures and successes. Parents who insist on providing for every need thwart a child’s development and rob them of life itself. Failure, pain and mistakes are success if we let children experience it and learn from it.
7.Children grow faster than we can keep up. About time we come to understand and adjust to a particular stage in their life, they have moved on. You will always be behind, thinking of them in terms of a previous molt. If we do not adjust and respect their new mature stage, but keep them in our mind where they are no longer, they will move on to friends who see them for who they really are.
8.Each child brought into this already overpopulated world places an enormous burden on carrying capacity of earth. The earth is finite. Reproduction is infinite…until there is environmental collapse.
9.Worrying about teenage hormone-driven kids-- who might do what you did when you were that age-- is hell.
With all that said, there will never be another time in life when you feel so important and are so needed as when you are raising your family. There is also no equal affinity you can have for another than that for your child. Watching development of children, when all things in world are fresh and new to them, is like reliving these discoveries and joys yourself.
But do not be deceived into thinking it lasts. It not only doesn’t, it passes so quickly you will be aghast. It is also cruel in that, although you are a constant to your child, they are an evolving creature with a series of deaths and rebirths through their various stages. You will long for soft tender feel of their infant bodies, their sweet milky breath, their cute antics and clumsy verbiage, their first steps, their fears that only you can allay, and awakening of their intellect. All these marvelous things pass quickly, ultimately leaving you with empty nest syndrome and to mourn each stage of their childhood that is gone forever.
Several children later, these are lessons I have learned. Would I like to experience rearing them all again? Yes, in a heartbeat. Did I do everything as well or as intelligently as I now perhaps could and am telling you to? No.
Such is life.
Dr. Wysong is author of seven books on health, nutrition, philosophy and origin of life. He is director of the non-profit Wysong Instute and author of the Wysong e-Health Newsletter (free on-line) now in its 18th year of continuous publication. He may be contacted at Wysong@Wysong.net and a free subscription to his e-Health Letter is available at http://www.wysong.net.
