LOVE this poem! And have always tried to live by it, as a mother and, yes, now, as a GM.
If only my own mother, as lovely as she was, had understood that you can't "give" your kids your "thoughts." She was often surprised - and frustrated - when she found I didn't do/believe advice she had given to me, despite her best efforts to give me good "reasons" for it. She just assumed that if she said I should do something for this, that and the other reason, I would just automatically accept/do it. This may have worked when I was a little kid, but not so much in my teens and once I was an adult? No. Yet, even then, she was often shocked and sometimes angry when it didn't (sigh).
