by Salina Prether

Created on: April 08, 2010   Last Updated: April 12, 2010

Bad habits Children learn from their parents is a good topic. As a young mother my mom use to tell me all the time " your gonna regret that some day" and I would think to myself , why it isn't nothing you didn't say when I was young. Now that my children are adults I understand now what she meant, because now I see my children making the same mistakes I made as a young parent. I believe that watching your children make the same mistakes you made might be one of the hardest things as a parent we might face, we did it now our children do it and will not listen as we did not listen to our parents when they tried to tell us it is a mistake.

As a young parent we are often over whelmed with stress and Pier pressure, we party and drink and might do other thing that as a parent would never want our children to do. Children learn from what they see, if we do it chances are they will too when they grow up. When I was a young parent I didn't understand this I often told my children " do as I say not as I do " . Well guess what, That never works. Children are a product of what they see from their parents and their surroundings. I smoke and both of my Children smoke, My husband drank and now both of my Children drink, We both cursed and now so do our children. It really breaks my heart to know that I instilled these things in my children.

I tell my daughter all the time that she works too much and she is missing the best part of her daughters life, I remember my mother telling me the same thing. Our children want to spent time with us for a very short time in their lives. If you are lucky your child will want to spend time with you for the first fifteen years of their lives then you come second to everything else. Fifteen years is not a lot of time considering how many more years you will spend watching them grow and making mistakes and hopefully learning from them. But if you don't spend time with them when they are young then what make you think they will know to spend time with you or better yet with their children.

So if you are a young parent and reading this please, please spend as much time with your children as you can and remember they will be and do and say what they see and hear you do and say. I wish I could do it all over again but I can't, all I can do is try to make them see that I made mistakes and hope they will listen. I wish I would have listened to my mother and father.

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