Children, Change and the Wisdom to Adapt

With our youngest son and his family due to visit soon, I’ve been thinking about one of life’s great certainties: change.

It arrives – whether we invite it or not – and we resist it before learning to live with it.

That is especially true when change reaches into the home, the family, and the way children are raised. Then it becomes personal. We are no longer discussing progress in the abstract; we are measuring today’s habits against the world we knew.

And that is where the trouble starts: What once looked like common sense to one generation can look old-fashioned and even unreasonable to the next. What seems strange today may in time become perfectly normal.