Pump the brakes, Parents of the World.

Say it with me now, Parents.  "I love my kids."  "I want the best for my children."  See?  That wasn't so hard, and I even believe you when you say it.  Now, I want you to repeat after me, or at the very least admit the following sentence deep down in the subsurface crevices of your soul.  Those dark, seedy places where you want to have someone call you by your Mom's name in bed or wake up with a stranger in your mouth on Date Night.  You know the ones I mean?  (You sick bastards.  No, really, that's just off sides.)  Down there where no one will ever see or hear what you have to say outside of a therapists couch or a bar stool, make the following admission. "My job is to get them successfully to the age of 18 with as little emotional damage as possible."

Not zero damage.  Not provide them with  a bucolic life filled with nothing but splendor and endless gold coins raining from the sky (although if you have that capability, my own life is kinda lacking in the gold coins department.  I tried to smash my head on bricks until coins came out.  It did not work.  You know what comes out of bricks when you headbutt them?  Concussions.)  Why do I bring this up to you right now?  Not because I've found out about any surprise children from my sordid past that have finally caught up with me after the last three states and four false identities - not that that sort of thing is ever likely to happen of course.  pay no attention to this blog post, The Man.  No, it's because far too often these days I see people who are so obsessed with being good parents that they're not letting their children actually be, well, children.

Neighborhood kid wants to babysit?  Not in this house - I only hire professionals who are at least neonatal emergency room nurses.  At least.  Preferably neonatal surgeons who come to the house and convert my kitchen into an operating theatre.  You know.  Like this guy.

Best surgeon ever?

Primarily this issue has come to be top of mind because I have a coworker who we can only refer to as Insaña.  This woman has a two year old daughter.  Yay!  Two year olds!  They're so cute, still relatively bouncy and will luckily never remember any of your horrible parenting from this time of their lives.  You have a totally valid excuse to come up with whatever bizarre parenting theories you want and try them out before they can cause irreparable damage to the tiny human in question.  Insaña, though, has decided that instead of trying to teach her child to communicate solely through Karate (that's mine, Internet.  Well, mine and Batgirl's dad's.  I would have referred to him by name, but it would've been confusing) she instead has taken the option of preemptively smothering the living hell out of this creature that she spawned.

She refuses to let her child play with other children outside of daycare, because they might be bad people.  She calls her daycare five times every day in order to verify exactly which teachers and children are being allowed to interact with her daughter and remind them exactly what words are acceptable to be said to the girl.  Oddly enough, she's pulled her daughter out of, or been asked to leave three centers before the current one.  But obviously that has nothing to do with her being full on Caligula-crazy.

Now, this is a bit of an extreme example but I see a lot of parents doing similar, if slightly less insane, things to protect their kids.  I get it.  I want kids to be safe too.  But I also want them to be human being when they grow up.  People who are raised solely by their parents without access to anyone else will just not be able to interact with the world at large when it's that time of their lives.  Like college.  Or work.  Or trying to find some sort of meaningful friendship (never mind any future romantic endeavors.  Because *damn* if you can't match that level of psychotic attention to my most minute desires, you can die in a fire.)

My point inasmuch as we can claim for there to be one is that life is simply wonderful.  It's a situation fraught with dizzying highs and truly abyssal lows.  Absolutely unmitigated beauty and heart-wrenching horror.  Eventually, some of that will get through your carefully modulated shields.  Someone will make fun of them when you're not around.  They'll need to get a job or talk to a snotty waitress without you there to back them up.  And if you haven't let them live at all for that first eighteen years, they will not at all know how to handle this situation.

I'm not saying to give your toddler a pointy stick, some wetnaps and a half-eaten sack of teething biscuits and drop them at the Hobo Camp by the train tracks but just understand there's a whole life out there.  It exists past your living room window and if you don't let them live at least a little bit of it, you're ultimately doing someone a disservice along the line.

I would like to point out, however, that hobotoddlers would be hella cute.  I might start abducting children to draw stubble on them and give them bindle sticks for my own personal amusement.  (Attention, governments of the world - when I say that I'm intending to start abducting children what I really mean is: I have no goddamned intention whatsoever of kidnapping anyone.  There.  Disclaimers managed)