Roller Skating Guilt

The other day I was feeling guilty, I know it's not an uncommon feeling in a parent, but this time is was because someone asked me if my kids knew how to roller skate. I know this isn't a critical life skill, but it made me think about the fact that I wasn't sure if they knew how. See, when I was a kid, right around age 7 a lot of friends were having roller skating birthday parties, so we all learned how to roller skate. And a lot of times my parents would take me roller skating or ice skating. We went and picked apples and peaches, depending on the season. And these were all fun family activities, but none of them are really things I carried forward with my own children. So I started to feel bad that maybe I wasn't giving them these sort of family building experiences that I had. And then I realized that the family memory building experiences we're doing are just different. We got to a lot more zoos than I went to as a child because my kids love animals and always get a kick out of seeing them doing all kinds of things as we go from exhibit to exhibit. We have Shabbat dinner, every week, and time to play games on Saturday afternoons. We do a lot more walks in the woods and all kinds of other things. So, really our family has just built our own set of activities that make up our free time and memory building time together. I think the key is just to know that what we did as children inform us, but doesn't necessarily have to inform what we do with our own children.