guilty

I had an epiphany yesterday. We were discussing a sense of guilt in Sunday School when someone in class noted that his first real experience with feeling guilt was when he was thirteen. Thirteen! This stuck out to me as weird, but what got me thinking was the fact that this was in response to a story about someone else who also had their first experience with serious guilt at age thirteen. My epiphany was that maybe what I assumed to be a normal level of guilt was actually wrong.

I cannot remember a first experience with feeling serious guilt about something that I had done, because I can't remember a time when I haven't had a healthy sense of guilt. I don't know for sure why I have such a well-developed sense of guilt. I assume it comes from a combination of genetics and environment, but what doesn't?

From the time I was very young I always marveled at those who could do things without much concern that I would have felt very guilty about. I guess I always knew on a subconscious level that the person probably didn't really feel guilt, but I never really could understand how the person didn't feel guilty. Didn't that person feel that their actions had consequences? Is this something that I was taught that others were not?

I think what concerns me the most is that I don't want to condemn my (long in the) future kids to having to deal with serious guilt issues, but at the same time I know my strong conscience kept me out of things that caused others to stumble. A parent must instill a sense of guilt in his or her child for the child to properly develop, I am sure, but how to strike the right balance. If I screwed that up, I'd feel so guilty.