Why do our children always disappoint us?

We spend 18 years carefully teaching and molding our kids, hoping they avoid the mistakes we made, praying they become upstanding, hard-working adults.

Don't listen to rock n' roll (or hip hop, or bebop, depending on the era), we warn them. Yet what do they do as soon as we turn our backs?

Still, we lecture: Join the Army, don't join the Army. Become a doctor, not a teacher. And for heaven's sake, don't go into journalism.

I heard that one, and like many kids, ignored the wisdom of my parents.

Because we are so sure of our own moral compass and political ideology, we probably also hope our kids follow us into the church pew and the voting booth. Yet, they rebel. The '60s hippie parents sometimes spawn the bow-tied neo-con. The bow-tied neo-con begets the philosophy major who panhandles for beer money.

Maybe it's the Lord's way of keeping the world upright.

But for the parent, it still stings. Can you imagine dinner at the Shrivers when Maria married Arnold?

So it has to sting right now for Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Here's what Bachmann said about President Obama's plan to expand AmeriCorps, a program that puts young adults to work making the world a better place by teaching disadvantaged kids and helping the poor:

"[It's] under the guise of quote, volunteerism, but it's not volunteers at all," she said on the Sue Jeffers radio show in April. "It's paying people to do work on behalf of government. There are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people get trained in the philosophy the government puts forward and then they have to go work in these politically correct forums.

"As a parent, I would have a very, very difficult time seeing my children do this."

You've probably guessed by now that Bachmann's son, Harrison Bachmann, recently joined Teach for America (TFA), one of the programs under the AmeriCorps umbrella.