I have found myself repeating to parents over the years: never parent out of fear.
I have found myself repeating to parents over the years: never parent out of fear.
Then I wondered to myself, have I been saying this all along and never realized it or has something about parenting changed? I believe that something in the way we parent has definitely shifted. We parents have become a very frightened lot.
What (beside everything) are we specifically frightened about when it comes to our children? We parents are terrified of our kids not being happy. We have arrived at a point in parenting history where the primary goal of hours in labor, years of working to make ends meet and reading parenting texts where we believe that the sum of our success rests in the happiness of our children.
How many times have you heard yourself mutter to your youngster (or adult child), “”all I want is for you to be happy.” I think I just told my 26 year old in graduate school that. The question for each of us longsuffering parents is, “is that what we really want for them?” Of course we don’t want them unhappy, but should the primary goal of parenting be the happiness of our children?
I don’t believe that it should be. As a matter of fact, I believe that when we make our child’s happiness the measure of great parenting, we fail our children. Parents who strive to keep their kids happy don’t end up with happy kids. Why? There are two reasons. First, what really makes kids happy is experiencing failure and learning to stand up again and try harder the next time. This act brings deep satisfaction to the child’s soul.