Dear LPG, 

In my opinion, nearly every situation we humans face dictates that we decide how we deal with them and as we get older, we can see them coming a lot more quickly than our younger selves can. 

I thought about this one day not so long ago as I took my granddaughter to nursery. It was a relatively wet and windy day, and she, like so many other four-year-olds, wanted to splash about in the many puddles that, after so much neglect, so many of our pavements often have to offer.  

It was time to make a decision. The adult inside me instinctively prompted me to discourage her from putting her right foot in the middle of the muddy one in front of us, but I hesitated. 

Adults are often too ready to look at everything with the practical eyes we have acquired over the years. 

When I thought about it, her shoes would not suffer too much, although I might have suffered from fall-out wetness, and if she got wet, she would have learned a lesson about practicality for herself (or not).

I know that I would not have been allowed a splash unless my mum was not looking back in my childhood days, but perhaps I have learned to be overly careful because of an upbringing where, as a young child, so much discipline was the accepted way for a parent to do things. 

Perhaps not being allowed to do such things when I was young left me with a sensible outlook for so much of my life that now, in my old age, I can think of so many things that I might have done differently had my choices been wider when I was younger.

Life is a balance of making choices; as we age, we make them all the time. The many restrictions we are taught to use when we are young have affected the breadth of risk we will allow to influence those choices. 

The puddle is just one example of many situations where I allow my grandchildren much less leeway than their parents when I am in charge.   So, while I still feel the need to teach her to be more disciplined, I wonder if when I exercise my level of discipline on her choices,, I might be leaving her  with a little too much common sense.

I think that perhaps one thing that so many people of my generation acquired, was the ability to make our choices based on the experiences taught all those years ago, resulting in the restrictions that now leave us looking back with an air of regret when it comes to so many of the choices we have made during our lives.

I now wonder just how many of the things I regret not doing are a direct result of the way I was brought up, if I am indirectly teaching my granddaughter to avoid taking risks with my lessons in common sense and if I will be partly responsible for her feelings of regret when she is my age, long after I am gone. 

JW, New Cross