Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.
—Robert Fulghum
Your kids can drive you nuts. The way they can push your buttons. The way they can ask an interminable number of questions. The way they can mimic you.
“I love him very dearly I guess because of his faults which are my faults,” the novelist John Steinbeck writes of his son. “I know where his pains and his panics come from.”
Our kids have our virtues and our vices. That’s what makes this whole crazy parenting thing such a wonderful opportunity. Because we are here to help them become the best possible versions of themselves. One of the ways we do that is to help them become like us in all the good ways. But one of the other ways is to prevent them from becoming too much like us in all the bad ways.
It can be an incredibly difficult balancing act if we aren’t honest or self- possessed, if we let our egos get in the way. We can’t let that happen. This is our chance, our time! To help them. To bolster them. To help them overcome flaws that maybe we never quite got over ourselves. To seize this second chance—to give what we didn’t get.
More than that, it’s a chance to understand.