I have no preconception that I’d like to see you be or do. I have no desire to foresee you, only to discover you. — Mary Haskell, in a letter to the poet Kahlil Gibran

The Kid is almost 2, and he’s not really speaking yet. He babbles, he signs, he knows a couple of words, and he makes animal sounds. But he doesn’t talk.

Even a cursory amount of Internet research turns up dire warnings about speech delays. The extreme importance of intervening with speech therapy early is often stressed. I’m not discounting this, and indeed, we are getting speech therapy for our son. If it helps him, great, and I certainly don’t see how it can hurt. Although if it does cause him undue stress, I will probably discontinue it.

The most difficult thing about this situation — and I imagine this is true with every parent of a child who experiences some kind of delay or abnormality in their development — is to tamp down the anxiety. I tell myself every day not to stress about this, that The Kid is doing just fine in other areas and is likely just a late talker. This is a case where access to too much information, via the Internet, is probably a bad thing. It raises anxieties unnecessarily, leads me to fret about the rarest of outcomes and makes me worry that my child is not “normal” enough.

I never even wanted my child to be “normal.” Of course, no one wants their child to have a developmental disorder or a disease. But I mean that I don’t want my child to fit comfortably into what is average and expected for every person. I certainly didn’t. Rather, I want The Kid to be exactly who he is, even if that means he’s not talking like the other kids his age.

Thomas Sowell has researched late talkers and has found a corollary between late talkers and ability in music, math and memory. He also gives this sage advice, which I think applies to all parents and children:

In this age of labels, when there is a government program for every label, parents have to be on guard against having their children pigeon-holed. The stakes are just too high.

One can’t help but be depressed by the constant doom and gloom being trumpeted on the news right now. I can’t decide whether the nonstop talk about the economic woes is contributing to the problem or not. But I do see an opportunity here, and others have written about it too (see The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph).

If you are forced to stop or slow down due to losing a job or business slowing down or just trying not to spend money, that is an opportunity for reflection that should be seized. It is a time to re-evaluate how we are spending our lives. No one can deny that the culture in America has been centered around spending, consuming and working long hours to make money to spend and consume. Perhaps chasing money and material things for happiness have helped us get into the situation. And I think it has largely been a futile chase.

Now we have the opportunity to decide if this is the life we choose to lead. This time too will pass. And when it does, will we return to our old ways and repeat the cycle all over again? Or will we realize that happiness may come from scaling back on work and spending in order to spend our time on more meaningful activities, such as being with our families, pursuing creative endeavors, getting in touch with our spiritual sides or learning something new?

I feel apprehensive about the time we are in, not because I am worried about the economic situation per se, but because I am afraid that we will let another opportunity for meaningful change pass us by. The last time I felt like this was immediately after September 11, when I believed that we were faced with an opportunity to come together as a society and make some important changes in how we lived. But we let that opportunity pass and now, nearly 8 years later, we are unquestionably worse off as a society. Will we let another opportunity go by? We can’t wait for someone else to do something. It is up to each of as individuals to take this moment to reflect, set priorities and take control of our own lives.

How can helicopter parenting — the new trend of hovering over your child constantly and micro-managing their life — be inspiring? Well, I keep reading about how we’re creating a generation of wimps who break down at the least bit of stress because they haven’t been properly exposed to the ups and downs of life due to their parents’ overprotectiveness.

And that led me to thinking about how overscheduled those poor kids are and how they aren’t allowed time to just be. That led me to thinking about how we overschedule ourselves and don’t allow time for just being. How we avoid risk and do the safe thing, even at the expense of our own happiness. We perpetrate our own sins on our kids.

It’s time for a backlash. For the sake of our kids and our own satisfaction with our lives, let’s not be afraid to try something different.

Let’s start by reinstating “free time.” For everybody. See what happens.

Not even the great guru of getting organized, David Allen of Getting Things Done fame, can claim to have the one solution to all of your organization woes. He has developed the perfect system to meet his specific needs, and in his book about it, he shares a lot of good ideas, some of which may work for you or me. The trick is to identify and borrow those ideas that are workable for you, and leave the rest. There’s no need to go to extremes: to either adopt the system wholesale even if it causes you pain or just abandon it altogether and declare it evil. Take what works for you, leave the rest and thank Mr. Allen for sharing.

This is the best approach to all new subjects you are learning about, whether it’s parenting or self improvement or how to manage a project effectively. Read widely and absorb what many people have to say on the subject. Try out those aspects that make sense to you and see if they work for you. If they do, adopt them. Leave the rest. Keep learning and tweaking and adapting as you go along. You are not obligated to all or nothing.

Unfortunately, this is just what proponents of a particular system would have you believe. Take attachment parenting, for instance. If you get at all involved in the community, you might think that if you don’t practice co-sleeping or baby wearing, you aren’t doing “real” attachment parenting. And probably you aren’t, not the way it is defined by its fanatical adherents. However, you can adopt only those aspects of it that make sense for you and your family, and you’ll be doing quite all right. There is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. And I don’t mean to pick on this one particular community. All “movements” seem to have their extremely rigid adherents who claim that if you don’t practice by the book, you’re not really practicing (even hula-hooping).

I propose that it is better to question, test and draw your own conclusions — in other words, think for yourself — rather than blindly follow any system set down in a book or website.