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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

A related joke I have is that everyone talks about the terrible twos, but says nothing about threes. Because it turns out that two year old tantrums are sort of adorable, and if we told people what happens next, they would never take off the condom.

And another comment I'm making recently is ... "Everyone says they want to have a baby, but nobody ever says I want to have a teenager!" It's probably for the best people don't think that far ahead. I'm growing gray hair at a prodigious rate right now, and my oldest still has six months before she's actually a teen.

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> A related joke I have is that everyone talks about the terrible twos, but says nothing about threes. Because it turns out that two year old tantrums are sort of adorable, and if we told people what happens next, they would never take off the condom.

Ah, the threenager!

Then the Fournado. After that, the Fuck-You-I'm-Five.

I have several teens, and have adopted several more [As in, there are over a hundred teenagers that feel comfortable in my house.]

It is awesome. Teenagers are the best age group there is.

I highly suggest that people take a book or two on parenting and seriously adopt what they have to say. Raise your kids from a young age on the premise that you want to have a relationship that will last till you die.

(In my experience, the best book I've read is "Raise your children without raising your voice".)

Set aside time and effort to make the relationship work for real. This is an investment and will not invest itself.

Religion is important, family is important, cellphone use should be filtered and limited in a matter-of-fact way from when they are first getting a cellphone. [OK, phones are a big deal to get right, but this is not a blog.]

The result is relationships with your own kids that have unbounded energy, talent, resources, interest, etc. - that are just going out on their own to explore the world and conquer it.

Well, well, worth the investment.

> Because it turns out that two year old tantrums are sort of adorable, and if we told people what happens next, they would never take off the condom.

Spoiler alert: even more tantrums, which also last longer and are trickier to defuse. Talking them out of one gets more difficult, as the kid will likely talk back, and might even catch you in the act of committing logical fallacies, because in this period of time, their 3yo brain works better than your sleep-deprived one.

On the other hand, the feats of logic my kid performs to argue their case - hearing them almost makes up for all of it.

Ours has a rep of being a little lawyer. They can be quite persuasive. We used to say "We don't negotiate with terrorists" until that started getting screamed out at daycare, then we had to put it away.

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