Think about these ideas, parents, or prospective parents...and feel free to comment

From "Conversations With God," by Neil Donald Walsch:

"The truth is, most humans are not equipped to raise children even in their 30s and 40s – and shouldn’t be expected to. They really haven’t lived enough as adults to pass deep wisdom to their children. Your younger years were never meant to be for truth-teaching, but for truth-gathering. How can you teach children a truth you haven’t yet gathered? You can’t, of course. So, you’ll wind up telling them the only truth you know – the truth of others, your father’s, your mother’s, your cultures’, your religion’s, anything, everything but your own truth. You are still searching for that, searching and experimenting, finding and falling, forming and reforming your truth, your idea about yourself until you are half a century on this planet, or near to it. It is the elders who should raise the offspring – and who were intended to. In any society where producing offspring at a young age is not considered “wrong” because the tribal elders raise them and there is, therefore, no sense of burden, sexual repression is unheard of, and so is rape, deviance and sexual dysfunction. Parents see their children whenever they wish, live with them if they choose, but they are not solely responsible for their care and upbringing. The physical, social, and spiritual needs of the children are met by the entire community, and education and values offered by the elders. If your elders aren’t contributing, its because you have not allowed them to. In parenting, politics, economics, and even religion, you have become a youth-worshipping, elder-dismissing society, and so you have lost much richness and resource."

From Kahlil Gibran:

"“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
 They come through you but not from you,
 And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
 You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
 For they have their own thoughts.
 You may house their bodies but not their souls,
 For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
 You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
 For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
 You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
 The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that 
 His arrows may go swift and far Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
 For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”