Things You Don’t Know Until You’re a Parent
Read more articles on Teens and Let Me Share With You.October 27, 2006
Posted by Karen Amato Schwartz
October 27, 2006
Posted by Karen Amato Schwartz
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Life looks so much different about 12 years after starting a family. It’s scary. Remembering my teenage years, I recollect girls getting pregnant at 15 and having no real concept of the magnitude. I remember make-out/sex parties (as a simply innocent bystander, you must realize…) that give me cause to think when my daughter says she’s going to a “party”. I remember my mother’s fears about my driving, and now cannot imagine my kid behind the wheel of any moving vehicle, even in an empty parking lot.
Life has come full circle, it seems. This is the time we get “comeuppance” for our own wild years. This is when we finally grasp our own parents.
My parents were pretty strict, and I must say it encouraged me tow the line a bit more than if they had not been. It’s only now I can appreciate it. Even in my early adulthood, I had some animosity towards them. But now, only now, I get it. Someone told me you cannot trust any teenager, and at the time, like all parents, I thought, “Oh, I’ll be able to trust mine.” Uh huh. Let’s put it this way: you may be able to trust them, but it’s all the “other kids” and their motives, when, put into group dynamics, you can’t trust.
So this is my fate for the next several years, along with every other parent. At times I think I’m even stricter than my own parents, but times are rougher now. Other times, I wonder how my parents let me do some of the things I did! All in all, the appreciation of what my parents went through is 180 degrees different from what it was for the majority of my life. I guess life is meant to work that way: by the time we finally learn something, it’s usually late in the game. But better late than never, right?
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