Parenting is not for the weak minded.
Or for those with a weak stomach now
that I think about it.
How a baby can get that much goo into a
single diaper I still do not know.
I speak of the joys of parenting from a
place of wisdom and experience.
Despite protests from many of my
so-called friends, I reproduced three times. I have brought three
children into the world.
Well, technically my wife did all the
work, what with carrying them around for nine months and doing stuff
like creating lungs and a heart and what not.
But I did my role to make a baby
possible and once the kids were born I stepped in as often as I could
– well, more or less anyway.
Raising children can be a challenge at
the best of times. It is a fine balancing act between heaping on too
much discipline and restricting too much of their freedom and letting
them run wild and watch them make the top of the news feed.
Children are always pushing the
boundaries of their confinements.
When they are little, their goal is to
escape from the crib, then they want to escape from their room and as
they get older they want to escape from the home they perceive as a
concentration camp and run through the streets like a bunch of
barbarians only with more of an attitude problem.
When they are in school they want to
test the boundaries of just how far they can push the teacher before
that vein in her head starts to throb like an alien trying to crawl
out of her cranium.
Some children push those boundaries a
lot farther than others and I am happy to say my wife and I were
never, er, rarely, called in to talk to the principal about the
actions of our children.
I am not saying we had perfect little
angels (like my parents did), but overall they are pretty darn good
kids.
Sure they did stupid kid stuff like
setting the kitchen on fire while cooking or accidentally shooting
out the window in my garage with a BB gun, but that is more youthful
inexperience that adolescent malice.
I can honestly say I never set the
kitchen on fire while cooking some hamburgers when I was a kid. Sure,
I set half a mountain on fire while playing with some matches with my
best friend, but at least our kitchen was fine.
Anyway, I knew going into it that my
children would do some dumb stuff either because of inexperience or
youthful bravado – of which I can claim incidents in both
categories.
Kids are kids, but there is a big
difference between youthful exuberance and being a little degenerate.
Youthful exuberance is seeing how far
you can jump your peddle bike,
Being a degenerate in training is
throwing a rock at your friend while he is seeing how far he can jump
on his peddle bike – which results in you crashing and immediately
looking for a better class of friend.
I noticed the bratty kids of my youth
mostly grew up to be trouble makers in their teen years.
Drugs, alcohol and a general bad
attitude accompanied them where ever they went and they soon had a
reputation that also went where ever they did.
While I was hardly a perfect little
saint spreading goodwill to my fellow man in the teen years, I was
also not a really bad kid. No drugs, no alcohol and no harmful acts,
just youthful stuff like speeding in my car, sneaking my girlfriend
out the side door 2 a.m. and other stuff that was relatively
harmless.
As far as I know, my own children are
walking a similar path. Are they little angels? Nope, but neither are
they the 'bad kids' other kids try to avoid, and that is close enough
for me.
Copyright 2016, Darren Handschuh
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