I Don’t Take Credit for My Kids

From a parenting standpoint, my wife and I have been very fortunate. We have raised two bright, well-adjusted, beautiful and passionate daughters, ages 28 and (almost) 21. They enjoy stable relationships with excellent guys and both couples face bright futures.

Yes, this may sound sickening and smug. And I would be the first to admit that my wife should be the one taking the most credit for their development, since she spends more time with them and had the most impact on raising them. But given all that, we’ve learned that it’s important to understand your limitations as a parent.

Kids are not computers. You can’t program them or command them to act in specific ways. Some perfectly attentive parents turn out children who become psychopathic killers, drug addicts, and various other forms of low life.

You probably know people like that—those who went to all the PTA meetings, parent-teacher conferences, were active in Boy/Girl Scouts, chaperoned at school functions, coached little league, monitored homework assignments, endured endless college campus tours, etc. Yet still their kids ended up serving time for robbing liquor stores.

Yeah, some parents just have bad luck. So, going back to my opening sentence, my wife and I have been very fortunate. We have self-motivated children who seem to love us very much—so what more can you ask?

But I’m thinking there’s more to it than just good luck—what else did we do? First, here are things we didn’t do:

• ·      We didn’t volunteer as much as other parents in our kids’ school and extracurricular activities
• ·      We didn’t hover over them when it came to homework and grades (and they still did well at school)
• ·      We didn’t force them to participate in activities that didn’t interest them
• ·      We didn’t have a say in the friends they made or the men they married (or are about to marry)
• ·      We didn’t force them to eat their vegetables
• ·      We didn’t stifle them in any way.

What we have done is encouraged them in all their endeavors. We always listen to them and offer suggestions, but never impose our solutions on them. We’ve exposed them to as many different experiences as our time and budget allowed with the hope of providing as rounded an experience as possible and to impart an appreciation for the great variety of life.

At no point did we expect to raise a dancer, an athlete, a musician, a scientist, a doctor, a whatever. But the idea was to lay out the possibilities and let our children discover their passion on their own—that’s not something we could do for them.

Personally, I am an attentive, though fairly hands-off, parent because I think this approach leads to more independent thinking—plus it saves me lots of time. My wife is more involved, but she is also is a firm believer in letting her kids discover their own path.

I’m not saying this is the best way to raise kids. But it worked for us.