We said a few weeks ago that the one thing you’ll wish as you look back on your life and your child’s life is that you wish you loved them more. You will wish you’d spent more time with them, accepted them more, told them how you felt more, held them close more.

Here’s another thing you’ll wish: You’ll wish you fought with them less.

As the years pass on and time renders things insignificant, you will be baffled by so many of the things you and your children argued about. You’ll wonder why it meant so much to you to keep the walls clean, why you were on them about tying their shoes so much, why you made such a big deal about grades that, in the end, turned out not to matter.

We fight with our kids about so much nonsense. We enforce rules that we don’t even care about. Why? Because we think we’re supposed to? Because we think it doesn’t harm things?

But it does. It takes a toll. Of course, as parents we do have to enforce some rules, some things are in fact worth arguing about.

You just need to be reminded today that most things are not that thing. Even if they feel like it.