We Don't Wife Our Husbands And We

Childhood Is A Fundamental Part Of All Human Lives, Parents Or Not, Since That's How We All Start Out. And Yet Babies And Young Children Are So Mysterious And Puzzling And Even Paradoxical.

People Talked About Being A Parent, Or Being A Mother Or A Father. We Don't Talk About "wiving" Our Husbands Or "friending" Our Friends, Or "childing" Our Parents. We Just Talk About Being In A Relationship With Those People. You Don't Measure Whether Your Marriage Was Good Based On Whether Or Not Your Husband Is Better Now Than He Was 10 Years Ago, Or Whether Your Friend Is Richer Than When They First Became Your Friend. The Relationships Between Parents And Children Is A Kind Of Love, Rather Than A Kind Of Work.

We Pass Our Values, Ideas And Moral Character On To Our Children, But We Do That Knowing That Our Children Are Going To Revise Our Knowledge And Reshape Their Values. There's Something Very Paradoxical And Profound About Being A Parent As Opposed To Parenting. We Put In All This Effort And Energy Not So That We Can Shape A Child Of A Particular Sort, But So That All Sorts Of Possibilities Can Happen In The Future.

What Happens When Children Reach Puberty Earlier And Adulthood Later? The Answer Is: A Good Deal Of Teenage Weirdness.

Children Are The Most Amazing Thing In The Universe, As Far As I'm Concerned. If You're Worrying About How It's Going To Turn Out, You Aren't Experiencing That Day-to-day Satisfaction Of Being With These Incredible, Extraordinary Creatures. Every Single One Of Them Is The Most Incredible, Extraordinary Creature That You're Ever Going To Want To See. I Think The Joy Of Having That Deep Relationship - That's The Core Of What Being A Parent Is.