[DoodleBob]

If your children feel like they can treat you like a small child while you still have your full mental faculties, you screwed up raising them.

I respectfully disagree.

To be sure, it's hard to raise a thoroughbred when the parents are asses.

But God gave us freewill, and that includes the kiddies, too. There are plenty of situations where decent parents do their best, and at least one of their offspring turns into a dolt while the rest are normal.

[hopespringseternal]

Even people who are wildly successful as parents recognize they screwed up in a lot of ways. But often parents are their children’s worst enemy, coddling and bargaining with them instead of parenting them.

But even when I was in disagreement with my parents it was readily apparent that any attempt to manipulate or patronize them would result in swift blowback — they simply would not tolerate it. And if I or my siblings had ever placed conditions on visiting them they would have just told us to go to hell.

That kind of feedback tends to correct a lot of behavior even in adults.