Being the youngest and only child of my parents, I had never really seen my parents parent another person. I also haven’t seen older siblings parent another person. Additionally, because my closest extended family lives 600 miles away, I never really saw anyone in action as a parent until my friends started having kids. 

Turns out, that made it a lot harder to get my bearings. But I was also coming in with fewer bad habits (I hope).

An interesting consequence of smaller family sizes and geographically distributed families will be that more of us learn to parent from our peers rather than our families. Not sure whether that’s good or bad.