I complained to my son that it is really hard for me to watch my grown kids (including him) making mistakes and I worry about them all the time and he said,
‘But isn’t that what being a parent is – watching your kids making mistakes and not being able to do anything about it?’
Which makes you wonder why we bother to teach history at all.
We really don’t learn from other peoples mistakes nor the mistakes made in history and stubbornly insist on making our own fresh set.
Each of us has to learn for ourselves that:
some soap looks exactly like white chocolate but doesn’t taste like white chocolate
hearts can break
words can hurt you
people say what they don’t mean and mean what they don’t say
cigarettes really are foul
wars do start over which side the bread is buttered (or whose god is bigger)
you mustn’t wipe your eyes immediately after putting on nail polish
not all relationships are good and should last for ever after
divorce hurts but you live anyway
you are becoming your parents whether you like it or not
you can survive most things
bad things happening to you don’t make you a bad person
most stuff is just dumb luck
Mind you, the real problem about worrying about my kids mistakes is that I am still making plenty of my own, bucket loads really, so with all my own mistakes to worry about, I don’t really have time to worry about theirs.
In true brilliant parenting –the kids are on their own – where they should be really – because making their own mistakes is the only way they’ll learn – they sure as hell never listen to me