TO ALL YOUNG PARENTS -- BIG BIG SPOILER ALERT

If life is like a movie whose surprise plot-twists you don't want to know upfront, that's fine. For you young parents, this then is a spoiler-alert. Don't read any further, because there's one plot-twist up ahead that will blow you away...!

If you're still with me, lets put that into context. Remember the joke about the 16-year-old who, when she turned 26, exclaimed: "Amazing how much smarter my parents got in just 10 years." Well, my fellow travelers on the parent itinerary, that lesson will apply to you too. For the rest of the trip.

Here's why. We're all traveling across the same bridge at the same time. Kids, parents, grandparents. It's the bridge from-here-to-there. Only each generation is crossing it at a different point in space & time.

The 16-year-old is just on the first part of the bridge so they can't really see -- much less understand -- what's up ahead and eventually what's at the far end. The young parents is further along, so you can look back and see what's still ahead for the kids [AKA, "been-there-done-that"]. Finally the grandparents who are nearing the end of the bridge, so we can look back and see almost the whole journey.

We're all on the same bridge at the same time. But we're all experiencing and dissecting it differently. Each of us from our own particular age-angle. Seeing its structure, strengths, and sanctities as differently as the man who built it in contrast to the man who's falling off it.  Which is why when the elder says to the younger, "when I was your age," the advice falls on ears that cannot hear. After all, they have about as much idea of what you're talking about as they do of the day and the world into which you first brought them.

Now here's why this was a spoiler alert from a grandparent to a parent. Surprise...! The very same thing is still true about you...