Three main parenting goals
You need to get certified to cure a human body, but need no certification to create one. Nobody teaches you to be a parent. It is expected that you can figure it out on your own by imitating your parents, learning from others, reading books, etc. The first five years after the birth are fairly straightforward — mostly covering the basic needs, teaching fundamental skills and main virtues. However, there are almost an infinite number of things you can teach a child once they grow beyond five years old, when it’s more about cognitive abilities and mental skills. After a child turns five, parenting goals become less obvious. My kids are 3 and 10 now and this question has been occupying my mind lately. In this blog post, I want to share my thoughts about overall parenting goals.
I started to think about this topic after I had stumbled on a few examples of parents who are obsessed with their kids’ future success. It seemed that their whole motivation was not quite right. My guess is that the parents’ egos are quite heavily involved so a child must match their parents’ standard of success or achieve what their parents have been unable to achieve. It took me awhile to get to the understanding that letting your ego intrude into goal-setting is not quite honest in regards to the kid. I concluded that my kids don’t owe me their success, which made me think about my parenting goals.
Quite often thinking backwards helps to understand a goal. The final phase of active parenting is a ready-to-go adult. What does “ready-to-go” mean? The best answer I found is being ready to face the world at the point when they leave their parents’ nest. There is no point to be ready for the ’80s, ’90s, or even today’s world as global conditions rapidly change.
Actually, these rapidly changing conditions are the biggest difference between parenting goals now and those of one hundred years ago. Back then the world didn’t change so dramatically; you could ignore the changing conditions and teach children to live under the current environment. Nowadays, technology and globalisation have shown us how dramatically the world can change in just a few years. Therefore, it does not make sense to focus on the trends and demands of the current world, e.g., specific skills or good-paying jobs. Any advantage that a child can get now could vanish tomorrow by myriads of other children who have decided to do the same thing. Once there is no shortage of a certain skill, there is no premium for having it.
In addition, every child is special and could potentially use their differences to their advantage. The differences might not seem good in the beginning. For example, I was surprised to hear that one successful Silicon Valley investor thinks that having a light form of Asperger syndrome could lead to a higher chance of success in founding a startup. Some parents, however, might decide to treat this syndrome. Therefore you don’t quite know if you are dealing with a weakness or potential advantage because you don’t know how the world is going to look in 20 years. Specific skills feel like an important but still secondary thing.
As skills can’t be used for setting goals, I looked into qualities that can indicate being ready-to-go. I started to think of a minimum set of qualities that every ready-to-go child must have to leave their parents’ home. Intuitively, I got to the following three qualities: independence, happiness and health. If a child has all three, then the parenting goals are achieved.
Goal #1: Independence
A child’s dependency is highest at birth and then very gradually decreases as the child ages. Ultimately, kids get comfortable living on their own by taking risks and learning to do more and more on their own. It starts with entering a dark room when they are three, continues with going to an overnight party and finishes with a decision of what to do with their lives. Throughout this process, kids need more and more trust from their parents. After some bad experience, parents might get afraid and stop increasing the freedom, which slows the movement to the end goal of independence. The following two ideas can help. The first one is nobody can learn without making mistakes. The second is that ultimately most kids become grownups and get their full freedom anyway. It would be safer for them to learn as much as possible before becoming adults. In other words, parents should gradually increase their kids’ freedom until they achieve full independence.
Goal #2: Happiness
The following two observations made me include happiness. The first observation is that every child is born super happy; they smile a hundred times a day. The second is that a lot of psychological issues with long-term impact are connected to the period before one turns 18 year old. If these two statements are correct, then it means that parenting mistakes lead to unhappiness in the later life of children.
You can’t really aim for happiness directly because such as approach mostly bring stupid ideas like ice cream and new toys, which clearly lead to ultimate failure. You help kids to deal with things that lead to unhappiness, e.g., unrealistic expectations, low self-esteem, and physical or emotional abuse. Experiencing these things and learning how to respond to them correctly would lead to a happier life. Parents should manage the level of exposure that a child can handle without trauma. A good analogy would be training an immune system by being sick once in a while. You have to be exposed to common viruses to stay healthy.
The parenting goal of happiness gets achieved when kids get enough exposure to life’s problems without becoming traumatised, e.g., parents stay around to help digest life’s challenges and to soften the extremes.
Goal #3: Health and Safety
Health and safety are the most obvious goals that occupy parents’ minds with no effort. People don’t really need to remind themselves about physical health and safety of their kids: it’s automatic. Therefore, at times these goals can get too much attention in comparison to happiness and independence because the last two require conscious decisions, whereas health and safety are often driven by fear. Achieving the other goals of independence and happiness requires some risk to health and safety, so parents should manage the balance among those goals. By doing so, I mean managing their fear, i.e., adapting to their children’s new levels of independence as they, e.g., climb trees or travel overseas on their own.
A more practical thought about health and safety is related to food consumption. Many people, including myself, were taught to leave a clean plate after dinner as a matter of respect and appreciation of our privilege of having food. This attitude comes from times when hunger was a real life threat. I changed my attitude toward food after the following observations. First, food production got a lot more efficient, so it is cheaper and hunger is not a real threat. Second, the average meal has increased in size and has a lot more calories due to frequent usage of cheese and mayonnaise. Third, people don’t move as much as before. Finally, the №1 cause of death for man is heart attack, which is a real life threat. The chances of getting a heart attack can decrease drastically if a kid learns moderate food consumption and develops a habit of getting regular physical activity. Therefore, the cult of clean plates should be changed to the cult of eating just enough.
Conclusion
Parenting is hard to learn because you get only a few chances and 20+ years of delay in getting the final feedback. In addition, kids are different and could change while ageing. Living in these turbulent times does not make it easy to find clear parenting goals. The above qualities have been helping me make parenting decisions. I wrote them down to pass onto my daughters, so they can evaluate my parenting goals against the outcome to adjust their parenting style, if necessary.
