PenPenWrites

A hundred Free Advice buttons arrived in a plastic bag as part of a donation to the thrift store — New4You — where I volunteer. I couldn’t resist adorning myself with a few of them.

Surely this was the button message meant for my blog readers. After all, most of us have stored up plenty of advice in the form of wisdom and experience to share with our adult children. But the question I raise time and again in posts is, should we offer it? As our children have blown past their toddler years and teen times, we have been morphing too. We’ve had to go from advisors–don’t put that dirty stick in your mouth; those shorts are too short to wear in public–to a counseling role. That is, to oversimplify, if they come to us today and ask us if they should dye their hair purple, we can feel free to say, “I’m a little slow on today’s styles, but purple’s never been your color.”

I have passed the buttons around with much glee to friends and fellow volunteers with adult children. (Lemme know if you want one.) Some of us doubled over in laughter at the thought of wearing the button the next time we saw one of our children.

But beyond the fun of it, these buttons hit home. I wish I could rejigger them to add just below the big green letters a note in smaller black type: But only when asked.

photo:selfie