Enjoy Your Kids While They're Young

As a parent you hear plenty of unsolicited advice.  Without doubt, the most common piece of advice I've heard from others is "Enjoy your kids while they're young".  This little nugget always comes from one of two types of people: grandparents or parents of teens.

The grandparents that give this advice always mean well, and if they would stop after submitting their advice, it wouldn't be so bad.  It's pretty solid advice.  The only time kids really look up to you and want to hang out with you is when they're young, so why not enjoy it.  And if you're lucky, maybe they'll like you again when they turn 30.  The problem comes when they
start telling you how to go about enjoying them.  They love to talk about how we should drop whatever we're doing and focus our attention on the kids. That's great if you see your kids once a week, but in their golden years, they seem to forget that this is a full time job.  If I dropped what I was doing to focus on the kids, more than likely I'd be dropping the baby.

Don't drop what you're doing if "burping a baby" is what you are doing.

 Putting meaningless chores away for today sounds great if you know you'll have a kid-free house tomorrow, but that doesn't fly in my home.  There is laundry to be put away, beds to be made, dinner to be cooked, and a quickly drying mixture of poop and corn that needs to be scraped off of my toddler's bedroom wall.  I don't always get to enjoy my kids.  Dropping everything is not an option.


And then there are the parents of teens.  When they say this to you, they aren't just giving you advice; they're warning you.  Again, if they would just stop right after those six little words, it'd be great.  But, they insist on telling you the horror stories that develop in the tween years and blossom fully during puberty.  Thank you for the depressing outlook on my childrens' futures.  I'm sorry your son had an "episode" that involved bath salts, nudity, and cannibalism, but unless you're following that up with some advice on the zombie apocalypse, that's just too much information.

Every time well meaning people try to give me advice there is really only one thing to do...Smile and Nod.