So you understand

This post is for the adult children out there...

We want you to understand why we do some of the things we do. For example, why do we say one thing and do another?

There is a difference between hypocritical and wanting better for our children. Among the most common subjects where this pops up are smoking/drinking/drugs, premarital sex, raising children. Most often we want you to have a better life, an easier time of it, more joy, a lighter heart...we want to help you avoid the things we know to cause pain and suffering to you or to the people you love. We are not keeping you from having fun or correcting our mistakes through you, or  whatever. Even if we are stuck in doing whatever it is we are advising you against, it is out of love for you.

When children are young we insist that they only cross the road at a cross walk, stop and look both ways before crossing and walk, don't't run. Do we? Not usually. We run across the road. Jaywalk. And usually only stop if the quick glance indicates it is necessary. Does that make us hypocrites? Maybe. But we do it to keep them safe, to teach them the important aspects of crossing a street, to allow them to develop the wisdom and experience it takes to make appropriate decisions about crossing the street when they are older and we are not there anymore. So too with those things more abstract than crossing the street.

We tell you not to smoke even if we did because we now know the dangers, the addiction, the health issues first hand. Even if we are still smoking because we are stuck in that addiction. We tell you not to do drugs even if 'everybody' did when we were that age because we watched it ruin our best friend's life, we carried our overdosed roommate to the emergency room in college, or we know someone in a mental institution from the damage drugs did to their brain. But there are lots of people who smoke or do drugs or have sex that are perfectly fine, you argue. Are they really fine? Have you ever asked about the regret in their hearts that they hide, or the sadness they live with everyday from missing the person they lost, or the ring they wear to remember the baby they chose to abort? Yes, there are people who don't appear to have suffered anything. Maybe they didn't. Maybe they can't or won't admit it even to themselves. Maybe someone else is suffering because of them.

We want to help you avoid some of that pain. We want you to completely enjoy your wedding night and every night after that because you have waited for the one person you can give your whole self to. We want you to avoid the chemotherapy for lung cancer. We want you to have a close relationship with children that you enjoy. You are going to make your own mistakes and we can not protect you from that. But we can try to protect you from the more serious, deadly mistakes that we know from experience rarely come without long term, harsh consequences. We want your mistakes to be less. There will be enough pain and suffering from things out of your control.

Remember this the next time you want to tell us that you know we did it when we were younger, or that we do it so why shouldn't you if you want to, or that we shouldn't be hypocrites. We do it out of love.