Loved this bit of Seth Godin wisdom first thing this morning. For adults he says "Crankiness isn’t a feature. It’s a bug". He is right ofcourse but the idea extends to many other forms of childishness that adults display. What was cute in kindergarten is repulsive in a thirty year old. Though often those bad habits stick around way past thirty and you have on your hands an absolutely insufferable sixty year old. It is like they needed behavior training their whole life and never received any. Bad parenting is a gift that keeps giving and its the world at large that is left to deal with it.
This brought to mind a certain individual I happen to know. V by any objective measure is very hard to deal with and be around, even her kids attest to that. She has developed coping mechanisms over the years to attention bomb random strangers who she can strike up conversations with on demand and then go on with her life. So observing from the outside she seems friendly and chatty. That is only good for a fifteen minute interaction. Beyond that V is unable to control that bratty toddler inside her that is now a full featured menace at sixty. Maybe no one told her that for an adult bratty is not a feature but a bug.
I don't know if I am done raising J yet. Even though there is little for me to do actively these days, I do draw her attention to areas of improvement, quirks of character that are cute at her age but won't be ten years out. Some of the advisory sticks and I do see change over time. The rest I expect is a process of smoothing as she goes through life, meeting various forms of resistance and friction.
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