{"id":6941,"date":"2012-12-10T03:00:12","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/?p=6941"},"modified":"2012-12-11T12:52:25","modified_gmt":"2012-12-11T20:52:25","slug":"books-and-babies-labors-of-love-by-michael-larsen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writersfunzone.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/10\/books-and-babies-labors-of-love-by-michael-larsen\/","title":{"rendered":"Books and Babies: Labors of Love by Michael Larsen"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Enjoy this guest post by Michael Larsen, literary agent and founder of the San Francisco Writers Conference, happening Feb. 2013. More details at the bottom of this post.<\/p>\n

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The Yankee sage Yogi Berra once said that \u201cPredictions are hard, especially about the future.\u201d At the end of the nineteenth century, people believed that New York could never grow to a million people, because there\u00a0wouldn’t\u00a0be room to stall the horses. This was shortly before the arrival of the subway. This is an example of straight-line thinking, assuming the future will be an extension of the present. Experts predicted that by 2050, the earth\u2019s population would explode to 9 billion people. But around the world birth rates are dropping. Now the challenge is to have enough children to sustain a country.<\/p>\n

But the right to bear children the world needs brings the responsibility to be models for them. Without models, children will become burdens to themselves, the people in their lives, and to society. The love, patience, compassion, knowledge, generosity, conscientiousness, selflessness, skills, \u00a0sacrifice, pride, forbearance, discipline, determination, resourcefulness, creativity, courage, understanding, sense of humor, and spiritual beliefs needed to be a parent and a model make it life\u2019s hardest personal challenge. (Unmentioned is the $250,000 it takes to raise a child to the age of seventeen.)<\/p>\n

But from the moment of conception, parenting, like writing, has to be a labor of love. Parenting requires spending two decades transforming a human being from being totally dependent into being capable of living and thinking independently. It\u2019s a perpetual push-and-pull effect. You are pushing them to be independent while pulling them back from challenges they\u2019re not ready for. Loving households, regardless of parents\u2019 sexual needs are a blessing, but parenting requires yin and yang, a man and a woman, as models on which children can base and balance their identities.<\/p>\n

The result of parents\u2019 handiwork should be someone who<\/p>\n