Have you ever been in a store and seen a child acting up and instead of looking at the parent with condescending eyes, you are relieved that it is not only your child that acts up? In our quest to be the "perfect" parents, we at times need to have a reality check. We will NEVER be the perfect parents so why do we strive to be so hard.
Remember when our parents used to tell us how hard they had it as a child and we used to roll our eyes at them, well I find that I am now doing just what my parents did, and I swore I would never do. Here was the conversation with Jake and Cole this morning:
Jake: Did you have Bell satellite when you were little?
Bruce: No, we didn't even have a TV for a long time.
Me: No, we had a TV that only had channels 2-13 (and 13 was french so you couldn't count that). And you know what? We had to go up to the TV and change the channel with a little nob. You don't know.....
And that is where I stopped and realized, "Oh my gosh, I am becoming my parents". But then I also realized how much "extra" the kids have now. Right now I am sitting in front of my TV typing on my laptop that is wireless, texting messages on my cell phone, and watching the kids play on a console in which they are the controllers.
Not to age myself and have everyone rolling their eyes at me but think of this, when I little we got a Commodore 64 that ran off of cassette tapes and took forever to load a game (and by forever I mean 10's of minutes, not a couple of seconds which constitutes a slow computer now) , the cell phone was on the Jetsons not a "real" thing and your regular phones were hooked into the wall with a curly cord and you had to stand and talk (no walking around with cordless phones).
I look at all this new technology that is coming and am scared as to where it can go from here. If they could come up with the "perfect parent robot" in which they did all the disciplining and we got to enjoy the benefits I am in. Maybe that will be something that my kids will be saying when they are my age, "When I was a kid, my parents actually had to discipline me".
Paddling along this river called life.....
