I always make it a point not to present myself as an expert in parenting, but as I continue through the process (which I did not undertake until I was 41) a core belief becomes more and more an article of faith:
Chief among a parent's responsibilities is that by which the child is duly acquainted with disappointment.
In a refreshingly straightforward meditation in The New Yorker, Joan Acocella notes:
"...the steamy devotion shown by later generations of parents ... has produced snotty little brats filled with anger at such abstract enemies as 'The System,' and intellectual lightweights, certain that their every thought is of great consequence, because their parents told them so..." Read on, if you dare.
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