6 . Are parents rational (理性的) about their children? No. Parents aren’t rational because ________ isn’t rational. Young people can understand this about romantic love, but they find it ________ to accept this part in parental love.

My eldest daughter’s ________ the other day brought this up. “Let me ask you something, Dad,” she began in patiently controlled ________ that every experienced parent knows.

“I sailed around the Mediterranean in a yacht (游艇) when I was seventeen,” she said. “I hiked through the Pyrenees from Spain to Paris. I’ve done rock climbing and deep-sea diving and slept in rainforests in the jungle of Indonesia. Right?”

“Right,” I said, “So what?”

“So this,” she went on. “When I go to the corner drugstore to pick up some shampoo, why do you always tell me to be ________ when I cross the street?”

There is no satisfactory ________ a parent can give to this.

All I could say in reply was that when I was 50, my mother would ________ me not to drive too fast. If I were 80 and she were still alive, I would be getting the ________ warning. No matter what the age, a child is a child.

There is something else, too, that children find it hard to understand. When they are far away, there is nothing we can do about their ________. They are in the hands of the gods. Parents try not to ________ about it.

But when the children are close, the old protective urge quickly ________, and it doesn’t ________ how far they have been or what experiences they have got through.

Most ________ happen around the corner, not in the rainforest. The most instinctive (本能的) act of almost every creature is to ________ its young, and with humans this reaction stays for a lifetime.

In the parents’ mind, a child ages but does not ________. Rational? No. But if we were rational, would we want children at all?