I’m tired of all the ways we guilt ourselves as parents. Kids misbehave? Our fault. Bad grades? Our fault. We don’t spend enough time with our kids. Guilt! We don’t protect our kids well enough. Guilt! I, for one, am done with the guilt.

The latest thing? Yelling. The New York Times has over 300 comments on a post about the horrors of yelling at our kids, how guilty we feel about it, and how to make it all go away.

Don’t worry, I’m as guilty of yelling as anyone else. I have done it and no, I’m not proud of it either. I’ve gotten frustrated and angry and I’ve raised my voice. More than once. News flash — parents are human. We get frustrated. We yell sometimes.
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It happens all the time, even with careful planning. Someday, somewhere, one of your kids is going to need to use a public bathroom and only the opposite-gender parent is going to be available to accompany.

You know what I’m talking about. Your son in the ladies’ room with you. Your daughter in the men’s room with her daddy. It happens. But how do we feel about it?

My daughter, when she was 4 and 5, was frequently escorted to public restroom by her father. I was doing 24/7 nursing with her baby brother and Daddy was more than happy to assist his daughter in her time of need. I pretty much had to turn a blind eye to the whole routine and let go, but I remember being concerned with statements he made to me from time to time in an offhand way such as “men’s toilets aren’t all that clean.” He had been changing her diaper in public bathroom on airplanes and in restaurants since she was small, and I trusted that he was keeping her from contact with dirty surfaces, but it never entered into my mind until I sat down to write this post that my daughter probably was confronted with the sight of urinating grown men.
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I was appalled to read the story of Zachary Christie, the Newark, Delaware first-grader who was suspended last week for bringing his Cub Scout spork-type utensil to school so he could use it to eat his lunch.

A six-year old Cub Scout, who frequently wears a shirt and tie to school because it’s a way to express his excitement about being there, is now suspended and sentenced to reform school for 45 days while his mom scrambles to provide a homeschooling alternative. All because he was excited over his new combination fork-knife-spoon and wanted to use it at school.

Zero-tolerance weapons policies have been established in schools all over the U.S., set in place to protect kids in large part as backlash from the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings. Guns don’t belong in schools, and I think we can all agree on this.
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When my older son was 7, he decided to relieve me of the 30 minute each way country-lane commute to his school every morning and afternoon. After all, he reasoned, surely I could do something else with the two hours-plus I spent every day in the car, taking him to school and picking him up again. A train. A nice friendly train. Yes, our community really did need a train that went from exactly our house to exactly his school.

So he decided to raise money for the train — by making felted wool balls at home and selling them in his school’s store. It all made sense. So he got to work. After the first day he decided that it would take a LOT of felted wool balls to buy a real live train.

Remember those days? Kids are relentless optimists. Who else expects to make a zillion dollars from a sidewalk stand selling cups of warm lemonade? I know I had high hopes when it came to selling magazines or greeting cards or sending in my Can You Draw This Pirate? artwork and winning a trip to art school.

But kids really do make a difference. Kids like yours. And I think we parents have an obligation to support them.
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