Do you look at your babies or children and get inkilings of what they might be?

How early can you predict what they might be in the future? At birth, one year old, two, three, thirteen, twenty one?  Personalities, temperament, interests and preferences can appear very early.

One of my favourite reads as a parent is the family supplement in The Guardian Weekend on a Saturday.  Many of the articles are like extended blog posts, packed full of the stories of real family life. Last weekend I read it at our local arts centre while my daughter did her Drama lesson and one article profiling Matt Damon's family really got me thinking.

His mother, an early year's professor, felt she knew her son would be an actor, and his brother an artist, from when they were very young, based on how they liked to play. Her predictions came true. As an early years professor, and with hindsight, it's perhaps easy to predict, or to feel you have predicted something. But there was something in it. I laughed at the image of a two year old Matt Damon refusing to leave the dressing up area at play school and I applauded his mum for telling the staff not to worry and to just let him be. While I try and give my children a fully rounded play experience, they both have very different ideas about what they enjoy.  As they grow I can see more and more natural preferences emerging. Property management, chef, office worker, pianist, artist, astronaut all look like favourable options...

Parenting it's a juggling act .....

..... it's easy to get lost sometimes, in the frustrating things, like being overtired, not having time to go to the gym or the toilet, not being allowed to hold a proper conversation, but what's the bigger picture? What do we gain? Lazy Daisy is a really positive space, which to me seems like a great foundation for the life changing journey that is parenthood. So this week I asked fellow parents if parenthood gave them a greater sense of purpose in life.

Here are ten of the life enhancing changes children made in our lives, do you agree?