Lauren at Feministe explains her "theory of parenting":
Children: Little people making bad decisions.
Adults: Helping little people make less bad decisions.
Parents: Obligated to help, to the best of their ability, their little people make the best decisions they can.
I think that's pretty accurate as a practical guide. At various times in my life I've described having a kid around as something like having a housemate who's permanently on acid. (This fits in with my overall belief that college students by and large behave pretty much like toddlers would if there were no grownups to make them stop doing stupid shit.)
The parent/child relationship is all about the love, the baseball playing, the warm fuzzy hugging and shit, but it's also very fundamentally a power relationship. You have a kid and all of a sudden you are the ruler of your own tiny, pants-pooping nation. And it's not a democracy, either. If it were, you'd be rapidly voted out of power and SpongeBob would be elected in a landslide.
One day I'm going to write a book called The Parent: A Practical & Theoretical Guide to Child-Rearing. It will be closely modelled on Machaivelli's The Prince.