Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains losses and disappointments but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.

I'm torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble - myself included - as fathers get older.

While not impossible it is especially challenging for teenage parents to develop bonds with their children. A high percent of them were themselves children of teenage parents and have never experienced appropriate parenting.

Don't reward bad behavior. It is one of the first rules of parenting. During the financial cataclysm of 2008 we said it differently. When we bailed out banks that had created their own misfortune we called it a 'moral hazard ' because the bailout absolved the bank's bad acts and created an incentive for it to make the same bad loans again.

We're living in a time when parenting is not at all mirroring the way I was parented. For me I just followed my parents around on their errands when they were busy on the phone I was quiet. It's a different kettle of fish these days: They run the house and you listen to their music and you go to their appointments.

No matter how calmly you try to referee parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior and I'm not talking about the kids. Their behavior is always normal.

It's a great mistake I think to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly.

Parents should not smoke in order to discourage their kids from smoking. A child is more likely to smoke when they have been raised in the environment of a smoker.