Raising Kids

If everyone knew how incredibly hard it is to raise children, no one would ever have children.

If everyone knew how incredibly wonderful it is to have children, everyone would have children.

The thing that worries me the most about raising my kids is the fear that my errors could screw them up for the rest of their lives. And sometimes I don’t even learn that I’ve made an error until a long time after the mistake. I’m afraid that I’m going to make some subtle mistake today, but I won’t learn of the dramatically bad results for another twenty years.

Having two children just means I get double the chances to screw up, or I get double the results from just one screw up. No, wait, I take that back. It’s not a multiplication equation, it’s an exponential function.

With two kids, I get: errors = x².

There are 1,440 minutes in a day, and each minute gives another chance to really screw up raising a child. So with having two children, I can make 2,073,600 mistakes each day.

Yeah, I totally feel this way. This is why we decided to stop at two children. When I meet parents who have three, or four, or even six kids (like when my mom and step dad combined all of us), it just boggles my mind to contemplate the potential number of serious mistakes that could be made.

And then I see something like this parked in the local mall parking lot:

Bullgrit