Parenting

When I think about having kids someday, I have mixed feelings: Excitement, anticipation and fear.

Raising kids in today’s world is terrifying. I want my kids to be open-minded and well-rounded, but how will I know if I'm exposing them to too much? How will I be able to trust my kids (and even let them out of the house!) when I know all the crazy, stupid, bad things I did?

You see these perfect, well behaved kids and wonder exactly what their parents did, but it doesn’t work like that for every child. Two parents can do the exact same thing and end up with very different results. And one parent can do the same thing with two different kids and also have different results.

I believe that it’s not 100% the parents fault if their child does stupid things, but I'm sure there is something that the parents could have done differently.

When I hear a piece of good parenting advice or see a parent doing something I want to make sure I NEVER do, I write it down in my journal. I feel like I better take all the advice I can get now! I can imagine that being a parent is hard, and it’s not easy to always value your child’s opinion or to let them be independent when you undoubtedly know what the best thing is. I guess you have to let your child learn from their mistakes. But I can imagine that that is a VERY difficult thing to watch.

I’ve gone out with guys who have asked me what I want my kids to be like (weird question, right? But I've had at least 3 guys ask me that!). I always answer, “The next gadol hador of course!” and then they always say, “Ok, but realistically?” And I tell them that I’m being serious. Why cant I have big dreams for my children? I don’t EXPECT my sons to be the next Reb Moshe Feinstein or my daughters the next Sarah Shneirer, but why cant I HOPE for that? But nowadays (thanks Ezzie for the spelling help) the most anyone can hope for is that their child keep shabbos.

How do I know I won't be one of those lazy parents who even when they sense that something might be going on, it takes too much effort and strain on their unflawed lives to look into it, and actually do something about it, so they just ignore it. They don’t want to break the naïve faultless image that they have in their mind of their child, so they would rather not know about any problems. So many awful things happen that could be prevented, if parents would just open their eyes and take action before it’s too late.

There are so many different parenting books with different opinions and new ideas, how do you know which one is the best? Do parents try every single one until they find one that works?

How is anyone ever ready to be a parent?!

I guess you can only do your best and pray that GD will do the rest.



I know you’re probably wondering why am I trying to perfect my parenting skills without even having yet found the man to have these kids with? I don’t know. This is just something I think about.