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Lessons Learned from Children

What Have Your Kids Been Teaching You?

By Amy Dingmann

"With my oldest, I feel like potty training took forever," says Palma Dean, a Canadian mother of two young girls. "With my youngest, getting her up and mobile is taking forever. My oldest was already walking by this point. My youngest is hardly crawling. However, I have to remember that each child is different and that all children don't do things at the same pace. But that takes patience!"

Robin Stevenson of St. Francis, Minn., looks back on "stages" with experience. After raising two girls to adulthood, she thinks by the time you get your kids to about age 5, you realize just how fast the stages come and go. "It's all perspective," she says. "As a child, you can't wait to grow up and then once you are there, you realize how fun and easy it was to be a kid. As a parent, you can't wait for your child to get through each stage, and once they pass the stage, there is just another stage to hurdle – usually more difficult than the one you just passed through. And you realize the years go by way too fast."

Children have a knack for bringing us to situations we never thought we'd have to deal with. Kids level the playing field between parents, and can serve up quite a helping of humble pie. They are also famous for making us say and do things we promised we'd never say and do.

"Many times phrases wuld come out of my mouth, and as I heard them I realized it could be own mother's voice I was hearing," Stevenson says. "And that was frustrating if it was something I said I would never say to my own children."

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