On Parenting

While I agree with Tigerhawk and John Derbyshire to a certain degree, I think the biggest difference between my childhood and my children's was that mine was less structured than theirs. But on the flip side, my children got to do and experience things I could only dream about.

TigerHawk: "John Derbyshire today wrote a paragraph that speaks precisely to my greatest regret as a father, that my children are not growing up with the freedom that I did:

I've been aware for some time, and reading that made me freshly aware, of my own great good fortune in having been in the last (actually, I think, about last but one, or last but a half) generation of Western children to have a real childhood: roaming over fields and through woods, falling out of trees and into ponds, experienced with firecrackers, roller-skates, airguns, and slingshots, being bullied and occasionally beaten up by older boys, playing 'British Bulldog' in the schoolyard, sailing model boats and flying model planes, playing complicated street games handed down intact from ancient Rome-and all with never an adult in sight! How lucky we were! How miserable our children must be!"