I sat in Sacrament meeting, watching the mother in front of me rip open a bag of fruit snacks. Five years ago I would have mentally tsk-tsk-ed and thought about how inappropriate it is to feed children in the chapel. I always prided myself on getting my children to behave without stuffing their mouths with snacks. I also prided myself on feeding my kids breakfast before we arrived at church, not during. I loved to turn up my nose at parents who treated Sacrament meeting like a little picnic.

Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that it really doesn’t matter if you break out food at church. Yes, it’s pretty unlovely to let your kids grind cheerios into the floor, but it doesn’t mean you’re a worse mom. Five years ago I would have disagreed from up on my high horse. Now I just smile at the mom in front of me with her five kids under age six and think, “do what you have to do. If fruit snacks are going to keep all seven of you from going ballistic at church then go for it.”

Now I have a houseful of teenagers and I am appalled at the things I used to sweat when my kids were little. So much of it did not matter. Maybe I just cared about things I was good at to pat myself on the back and feel better about my parenting skills. I used to feel torment—torment!—about whether my kids were academically advanced enough. Were they reading earlier than their peers? Were they in the gifted and talented program? Now I realize that pretty much the most important lesson my kids need to learn in school is the importance of working hard even though the stuff they have to do is dumb or boring. Because isn’t that just one of the most valuable lessons you can learn in life? Sometimes kids will be challenged in school and sometimes subjects will be easy. But working hard without being discouraged or slacking off is truly the skill that will take them far in life.

Extra-curricular activities are another thing that I thought were so important but they weren’t. I was asking my 8 year-old son about playing soccer when he was in kindergarten and he couldn’t remember anything except his coach was mean. He couldn’t remember the kids on his team or whether he even liked it. At the time I thought it was so important that we would miss birthday parties and skip family dinner to attend practices and games. I’ve had similar conversations with my daughter and her various dance lessons. At the time all these lessons and teams seemed very important but it turns out they were barely a blip on the radar of my kids’ lives. None of my teenagers have any of the same interests they did when they were little. We would have made more meaningful memories sitting around and playing card games for an hour and a half.

Here are a few things that matter more than I thought they would:

Saying you’re sorry. When my kids were very, very tiny I came up with the idea that I shouldn’t force them to say that they were sorry if they truly weren’t. It’s a nice idea in the abstract—making sure your kids feel genuine sorrow—but it’s pretty unrealistic. Not a lot of 4-year-olds feel super empathetic. Now I have completely changed my tune. The importance of learning to say that we’re sorry can’t be emphasized enough; even if we aren’t sorry. The very act of apologizing requires humility; it can change our hearts even if we started out being not so regretful. Apologizing brings peace to nearly any situation. Learn to fake it even if you don’t feel it.

Tucking kids into bed. I hate this. Hate it. By the time bedtime rolls around I have had it up to here! I just want to get all the people away from me. A lot of my friends tell me that this is when they have their closest moments with their children. I’m not going to lie; I don’t want to have conversations at this point. But I do know the importance of putting the brakes on and connecting one-on-one with the little ones in my life. In my house they get a book, a song and a prayer and that’s it. There is so much sweetness, though, in having that brief, still moment when our hearts are in it together. I look at my teenagers who stay up with friends or at work til late and I wonder when it was that I tucked them in the last time. What was the last book I read out loud to them as they sat in bed? I can’t remember but it seems like forever ago. Like the old ladies always say, these moments pass quickly.

Cooking and baking. There are so many memories we have of family traditions and every single one of them involves food somehow. It is a blessing to be able to feed my children and create wonderful food traditions as well; and then to be able to pass those traditions on to my children. Even the simple act of making cookies every Sunday night is something that the younger children look forward to learning to do on their own some day. Being able to cook from scratch and helping my kids learn how to do it to has brought more satisfaction to me than I ever imagined it would.

What are some of your experiences with the importance of things changing as you grow older? Have your ideas about child-rearing or the way people raise their own kids any different than they used to be?