What Nobody Tells You About 'Cute' Kid Behavior

I recently chatted with one of my friends about kids & parent. I shared one of my wife’s and my cardinal rules of parenting:

If it’s not cute when they’re 18, it’s not cute now.

It doesn’t mean kids don’t get to be kids. It does mean that we view their behavior through the lens of shaping them into the kind of people we want them to be as adults.

It also means that we’re orienting ourselves through a long-term lens of building & developing people, (hopefully) not through a lens of behavior management.