“Raising children is an incredibly difficult and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes made by the previous one.” - Bill Cosby . My mother once told me that when I grow up I will be just like her. I remember, to this day, seeing kids say, "I want to be just like my parents." As I think about it, I reflect: Would I want to be just like my mother? Or my ex-father? Then I said to myself, without a doubt, NO. As a child, I got to see my parents' behavior, their good and bad characteristics, the way they treated me and my siblings, and the pain of what my mother went through when my father left her. As they say, “history repeats itself”, but repeating the same mistakes, actions and consequences, I honestly wouldn't want it. Not just for me but for my future generation to come. So how exactly do I evolve from them? Take the good and leave out the bad? Take a different path than the one they took? Well, these questions are the right answers. Evolving from our parents means and should mean taking the good from them, leaving the bad they have done and taking a different path to a better future. As a reader, you may think: why shouldn't I be like my parents? Well, before you read on, I'm about to share with you a little bit of what my childhood consisted of. My childhood was not normal. What I experienced was probably a traumatic experience, but for me it was reality. When I was young, I saw my mother suffer a lot. My mother became pregnant at the age of seventeen, couldn't finish high school or go to college, and was forced to marry my father. When she was married to my father, my father abused her violently especially when h...... middle of paper ...... me and not fighting for food etc., of course there is evidence, obstacles and difficulties that arise may be similar to what my parents went through. To be completely honest, I failed. I probably made mistakes just like them, but that's the process of evolution. It's okay to make mistakes like them and like ours, but the point is not to repeat the same mistakes over and over, but to learn from them, so when they try to repeat themselves, there will be a different outcome, a different consequence. , a different future. As I leave you with this quote, think about your future. Think if you were to evolve from your parents and not be like them, would you have a better future? “If you don't see what's beyond your parents, you're not evolving, you're just looking at yourself and what you will be in the future.”-ML