• Babies grow up to be in-your-face teenagers and adults. They are not always so cuddly, cute and compliant. Yes, you will be god to them for about 12 wondrous years, but that’s it. Then you will have the rest of their life with responsibility without authority…they want you there to provide and pick up the pieces but don’t want to follow your advice.
• You will not make your children what you want them to be. They are not your toys, something to solve some ego or insecurity problem you have or a glob of clay for you to shape into your perfect view of a child (modeled after you, of course). They will not change from the first time you can recognize their personality in the crib until they die of old age. Don’t try to spank them into submission or conformity to your dream of what they should be. It will not change them but it will leave you with memories to regret. All you can do is provide a healthy and loving environment for them to be what they will be. The rest is up to them.
• You will never stop feeling a sense of responsibility toward them regardless of their age. You will never stop feeling guilt that you should have done more when they were young.
• Children are a dramatic departure from a single’s life and take a huge amount of energy and effort. It is no longer all about you. They require total devotion. If you have children when you are biologically ready in your teens, you will have plenty of energy to raise them, just not a whole lot of savvy to go along with that. You’re still a kid yourself and have not yet even figured out that the world does not rotate around you. They will be raised and gone
  
  
  while you are in your thirties. If you have children in your thirties, you will have plenty of energy to begin but will be running out of steam in your forties and fifties. You will have much more life wisdom to help in their rearing, however. Having children when you are quite young is therefore not a good idea, having them when you are quite old isn’t either. My vote, however, is to have them when you are older (not too), smarter, less egocentric, more mellow, are not thinking bar-scene and appreciate and savor the things around you more. A child is something to savor.
• You will never stop feeling as though they should listen to you (rightly so), but they will pretty much stop when they are about 12.
• The more you do for your children when they are older, the 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 and learn from them.
• Children grow faster than we can keep up. About the 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.
• Each child brought into this already overpopulated world places an enormous burden on the carrying capacity of the Earth. The Earth is finite. Reproduction is infinite…until there is environmental collapse.
• Worrying about teenage hormone-driven kids – who might do what you did when you were that age – is hell.

About the Author

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.