Here's some free advice

 Here is story number 27 of the second volume of my book.  I thought it would be appropriate to include it here.

The story title is "What advice from my parents do I wish I had followed?"

 This week’s question is a tough one and the answer is going to be short.  In fact I almost changed it to something else.  The reason is because first being 80 years old I have a lot of years to look back on and second in thinking back on all of those years I come to the realization that there simply wasn’t all that much advice from my parents to think about.  My parents weren’t really advice givers.  Life was not easy for us growing up so everyone had their hands full just dealing with it.  There really weren’t any occasions when my parents sat me down and dispensed advice nor did they in any other way.  So I was kind of free wheeling it and learning as I went.

 Oh sure, there were the usual platitudes like don’t smoke or do drugs, get an education, be nice, yada, yada, yada.  But I don’t honestly recall any specific piece of advice they might have given me much less did I follow it.  Besides, you know what they say about hindsight.  It’s always 20/20.  

 

The fact is giving advice is generally a fruitless gesture.  If someone asks for it, that’s one thing but let’s face it, how many people ask for it outside of a lawyer’s office.  I believe this holds true with children as well.  You can’t just simply sit down and start unloading your valuable advice on them.  Most kids are going to learn life’s lessons in one of two ways.  Either they’ll learn them the hard way which is to say they’ll make mistakes or they’ll learn them by seeing how their parents model decision making and then they’ll copy them.

 

The latter of the two is pretty much how we handled it as our two children were growing up.  My wife and I tried to model behaviors that would lead to good results or we would tell our kids stories of times when we were growing up when we wished we had done something or when we were glad we had done something.  From that point on the lessons of life tend to sink in as kids become adults. 

 

Sometimes problems occur when our children learn the wrong lesson or simply don’t learn from it and they make poor choices.  What will sometimes happen then is parents blame themselves for their children’s mistakes or problems.  That’s very unfortunate because it’s often not the parents’ fault.  The simple fact is grown children are going to make mistakes-sometimes big ones-in spite of their parents-not because of them.  My wife and I, as usual, learned that lesson the hard way.  In fact the lesson is never ending.

 

So what’s the take away to all of this (here it comes, more advice!)?    Simple.  Save your advice. Don’t worry. Be happy.  Easier said than done, isn’t it?