Parenting ignorance.

Being a parent of teens surrounded by parents of young kids leads to interesting observations. 

My Facebook news feed is filled with photos of adorable smiling babies and posts about sleep deprivation and breast feeding and themed birthday parties. 

I love it-- mostly I love the enthusiasm and excited expectation and pure love. You are in love with your baby in a far different way than you are when your kids are teens. And that enthusiasm brings nostalgia for us moms of old kids. 

Far away are your worries about the sex talk, the dreaded visit with your daughter to get contraception, the times your son ditches you to try and talk to girls with his friend. It's your distant future to stress about how highly your child's college of choice is ranked in the article about "Top Party Schools."

I fully believe that the realized fears of riding in cars with boys and teen parties and sex ed classes would be the end of our species. So keep living in your "ignorance is bliss" phase, new parents. Create the generation of people that will care for us in old age, that will continue to populate the earth. And don't tell them about the struggles of raising teens and the burden of the responsibility to make those teens decent people, until they call you for advice, distraught over their own teen's actions. Or else we will cease to exist, and never get to populate Mars or invent self-cleaning houses and flying cars. Although, who really wants flying cars anyway? Not me.