As a parent you spend so much time doing special things for all the little people in your life. The basics aside, I really feel like I go to great lengths to make my kids happy. Making their favorite meals, packing fun snacks, driving and picking them up from school every day. The list is long, but I do it because I want them to always know they are loved. And they do, but sometimes I can see that the little things are now expected. Blueberry pancakes are the new norm for Wednesday mornings and I should make special pasta from scratch every day.
Frustrated with the lack of appreciation, I started to poll my friends with older kids to see what the ‘age of appreciation’ was. Fifteen, seventeen, twenty? They all laughed. Their kids were those ages and still hadn’t started to realize what they had.
Funny enough, I came across an article today that gave me a point to shoot for. Looking to examine the various stages of the parent-child relationship Paramount Pictures surveyed 2,000 UK families and found that kids don’t fully understand how good they had it until they turned 27! Really? really. Only one in four people said they fully appreciated their parents when they were teenagers, while three-quarters of adults admitted to not giving their parents enough credit during their turbulent years.
The turning point? When they got their first job or left home for the first time.
A fifth more women than men said they learn the importance of their family when they went on to have children of their own or saw how other people were brought up.
And that could be the silver lining. Maybe our brains are programmed to not remember until the information is needed! When they become parents, they remember how we dealt with a situation, thus helping them but also giving them an understanding of what we went through while raising them. Make sense?
So the moral of the story is soldier on parents. At some point your kids will look back and realize how awesome you were and will hopefully pass that awesomeness on to the next generation!
