The purpose of childhood is to train for adulthood.

As parents, we’re so focused on providing the perfect childhood that we forget adulthood looms. We hover over our kids twenty four hours a day, we protect our kids from every imaginable harm, we cry with our kids when they’re hurting, we provide our kids with the best of everything, we run interference for our kids when they’re in trouble, we do science fair projects for our kids when they go to bed and we throw ticker-tape parades for them when they graduate from second grade.

We do everything for our kids except the one key thing we should have be doing all along: preparing them for adulthood. This is radical thinking. But today we have millions of twent-five year olds returning home because they’re not prepared to face a world of low starting salaries, angry bosses and hard deadlines. The bottom line is, we need to change. We need to do more than raise children. We need to raise future adults.