When Too Much Love is Not Enough

I meet these beautiful, talented and beloved young people, strong ones, but imploding due to the influences, pressures and excesses of modern life.

I wonder how it can happen to such cherished children of caring parents?

Is there such a thing as too much love?  We not only tell our children they can be anything; we expect them to be anything and everything.

Sometimes we expect them to prove something about how good we are, as reflected in the goodness of their lives.

Now there could never be too much love.  It's what the love is wrapped up in that pulls the nerves taut, that upsets the balance.  Love with too many strings attached.

No longer is youth a time of carefree abandon. The world turning too fast, and every day so many buttons to push before one lies down to sleep.

And with this earthly gyration comes, the expectation that each child should shake the world, till all the peaches fall off the tree. What if we allowed each youth to nibble on one peach at a time?

It might be wise to look again at what is truly important.  Is it any different for a twenty year old than for a sixty year old?

(Well, apart from sensible shoes, and getting enough fiber...)

Don't you expect to be loved and accepted, even when you are ordinary, or even less than ordinary in your abilities?

When you fail, do you know there's someone who loves and approves of you anyway -- and not because  they have to, but because they're eager fans?

Could it be all right to get "C"s in college, work at a dead end job, to be overweight, plain and down at the heels? Not to be able to carry a tune, nor conjugate a very, and never own a car?

Would you be proud of your child if he never went to college? Never invented a cure for the common cold?  Never built the first perpetual motion machine?

Would you be proud of yourself as a parent if your child were simply happy?