I realized today that I am really old. When we are young we believe that our kids are full of potential and that we are able to mold them into the purpose driven well balanced individuals that we would have loved to be ourselves (looking back over our misspent lives)..... Then it dawned on me in a flash of (not wisdom but rather shock) that like my own dads had to, we realize that our kids are actually just as stupid as we were when we were their age. We see them making the same mistakes as we did and we watch them bump their heads no matter what we say or do. I've come to realize that our primary role as parents is to guide them to the best of our abilities and our secondary role as parents is to just shake our heads, pick up the pieces and hope that their heads don't hurt too much from being bumped once again...