Our first son, Ben, was born over 18 years ago. I remember it well. We’re in the maternity ward of Bryn Mawr Hospital. The room is designed to look like an upscale hotel room. It’s spacious with tan walls, dark wood paneling and cabinets. All the medical equipment is conveniently hidden behind the cabinets and there’s an leather easy chair for me next to my wife’s bed. The birth takes over 24 hours and is exhausting for both of us — more for her. I hold my newborn son swaddled in a blue and white hospital blanket. I’m overwhelmed with joy and gratitude. He’s sweet, scrunched face has large blue eyes.
A little later that day, I panic — I’m partly responsible for this baby boy and I have no idea what I’m doing. He looks so fragile. What if I screw up and hurt my son? What if I make a small mistake that has a big impact on his tiny psyche? How will I know the right thing to do when we raise our son? I’m the youngest of three children — what do I know about raising children? Where’s the Owner’s Manual?
Today, our 15 and 18 year old sons are happy and well-adjusted. So far, parenting has gone much better than I expected. Our children are not perfect, but we’ve seen enough other families to know we’ve done an above average job.
Parenting is difficult and challenging. It’s time consuming to love, comfort, and care for your children, but that isn’t the hardest part. The hardest part is inventing your own parenting principles and rules to raise sane and happy human beings. In this post, I’m going to explain what worked for us with the hope it’ll help you with parenting.
We followed four guiding parenting principles when we raised our sons. The first principle is that your job as a parent is to prepare your child for adulthood. From the moment your child is born, he begins to “grow up”. You have to teach your child to be independent and a happy, productive citizen.
You are your child’s teacher not his friend. You can be his friend when he turns 18. Sometimes your child will like what you teach and sometimes he won’t — it doesn’t matter because he is too young to know what he needs to learn. Only you know.
You sometimes have to say “no”. Many parents are afraid to say “no” because they think this hurts their child’s self-esteem. This is ridiculous. You’re teaching your child there are boundaries between what he wants and what is permissible. You’re teaching your child that he can’t always get what he wants. Always saying “yes” may make you feel better, but is it in your child’s best interest?
The second principle we followed is that you prepare your children for adulthood by creating lessons that mimic adult life. In other words, you simulate life in the world outside the family so that you child understands how things work when he leaves the family. We looked for any experience that might teach a valuable life lesson.
So, what kinds of lessons are worth simulating? Here are the eight lessons we emphasized:
- Bad things sometimes happen to you for no reason. Whenever something bad happened to our children that was not their fault, we pointed out that these things sometimes happen. For instance, Ben had his IPod stolen from a locked locker in high school while he was at Cross Country practice. He had saved his own money to buy the IPod and he was angry at himself for “letting” it be stolen. I explained to him that he’d done nothing wrong – sometimes bad things happen. For this one time only, I offered to replace the IPod like an insurance company would if he had his IPod insured.
- You need to find work you enjoy, are good at, and can make a living at. We explained this concept many times to our children and helped them identify things they were good at and enjoyed. We also taught that you can’t just be anything you want to be. People have different talents and abilities and you need to find something that uses your own talents and abilities.
- You will make mistakes, but don’t worry about it. We taught our sons not be afraid of mistakes and to take reasonable risks. Children make mistakes all the time when they try new things. For instance, Nathan spilled milk on the floor the first time he tried to make cereal himself. We told him to just clean it up and learn from it — no big deal.
- If you break the rules, there are negative consequences. We established household rules and if they broke the rules, they were punished consistently and appropriately. “Appropriately” means we set the punishment to match the rule violation and, as much as possible, what happens in the real world. If they made a mess, they had to clean it up. If they hurt each other physically, they had a timeout (like prison). If they said something inappropriate, they had to apologize.
- Most people are kind and helpful, but some are not. Whenever our children would play with others, some children were nice and some were not. We taught them to know the difference and to choose friends carefully.
- You will have to learn to manage stressful situations. Both of our sons eventually became black belts in Tang Soo Do, a type of Korean Karate. Ben participated in his first tournament when he was six or seven. He had an excellent teacher and was already good at forms, a predefined sequence of moves like a dance. Everyone expected him to place in the competition. At the tournament, he sat in a line of about ten other children and waited his turn to go in front of the three black-belt judges. The judges hold up large score cards for each child after they’re done. The place is large with lots of spectators and things going on in other squares. Ben did his form and missed steps he had practiced hundreds of times. He was just too nervous and stressed. On the way home, my wife and I discussed how this was a good opportunity for Ben to learn to manage his own stress. For the next tournament, we taught him to calm his mind through visualization and by physically staying loose. He got a first place trophy, and, more importantly, he learned he could perform despite his stress.
- You will have to compete with others. Both Ben and Nathan get excellent grades and play multiple sports. We taught them that they must compete with other people for grades and sports and that’s just the way life is. Nobody can do well at everything. Competing can be fun if you don’t invest your ego and self-esteem into it.
- Personal finance is important and you must live within your means. We gave both our children allowances starting around age six and taught them to save some of the money and spend the rest. They started to save for things and learned about deferred gratification. We also taught them that you have to live within your means. As opportunities presented themselves, we taught about debt, interest rates, credit cards, buying cars, and frugality, and so on.
The third guiding principle is to let your child discover his own unique talents and interests. Some parents decide that they want their child to be a doctor or lawyer when he’s three years old. They forcefully guide their child in a direction that may not fit their child’s natural talents and interests. Let your child explore the world so he can discover his own talents.
Along the way, your child will try and discard many hobbies, activities, and sports. This is normal and helpful in finding what he truly enjoys. Encourage this.
The forth guiding principle is to give your child responsibility as soon as he is close to ready. Some parents try the shelter their child from difficult decisions and responsibilities. This makes your child unprepared when he leaves home. We did the opposite. Whenever we felt our child was almost ready, we started giving him authority and responsibilities. For instance, we saved up a certain amount of money for each of our son’s college education. There is enough money for each son to go to a public, four year university. We told them when they were freshmen in high school that they each get that amount for college and they can decide where to go to school. But if they needed any extra money, they would have to borrow and pay back the money. We also told them that any money left over was theirs to use for launching their post-college life. Ben worked hard to get an academic scholarship to the University of Miami and saves the money he earns from summer jobs so that he has money when he graduates. Nathan is a sophomore in high school, but has already started thinking about colleges.
Does our advice make sense to you? What child raising stories and advice do you have?
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These are great lessons — not only for children but for adults as well. YOU should write a manual for raising kids!
This is very helpful, indeed! This is very similar to the way I try to raise my daughter. I like breaking it down into three guiding principles. In that way, any decision can be evaluated against the three principles, and give you a “heads up” on the big picture, and how the lesson at hand fits into that picture. I’m thinking that I should do some thinking along those lines..,perhaps develop my own set of guiding principles. Or maybe I just need to formalize, and articulate them. Hmmmm…
Thanks, Roger! I needed this!
Awww… this is beautiful. I mostly like that you guys had a strategy, a purpose… that you made an EFFORT to help your kids become decent human beings.
I just spent the better part of the afternoon at a playground with Hunter and I was quite literally appalled at the way the other kids behaved and, mostly, at the fact that the parents did NOTHING to correct them. How are they supposed to learn that the playground scene is not intended to be a Lord of the Flies scenario? A little decency and respect would go a LONG way.
I should add that when we used to go to playgrounds in downtown Austin (like Zilker Park) I did not notice this same barbaric behavior. One of the main differences was that the parents (often mom AND dad) were right there with or near the kids, paying attention to how their little ones were managing life in the “real world” and correcting them as necessary. Oh, and totally novel concept: TALKING to their kids so they would understand what they were doing wrong. Imagine!
Anyway, I could ramble on for days about this… I should probably just write a post about playground politics and parental indifference. BTW, you (and Jay) should definitely write the owner’s manual for new parents. I think EVERY parent of a brand new baby gets home and thinks, “Now what!?”
@Postively Present: Thanks, but I’m already doing about all the writing I can handle right now.
@Jay Schryer: I think it’s a great idea for you to write down your own set of guiding principles. You could blog it and then we could compare notes!
@Lisis: It is amazing how many parents think that children will just raise themselves. There’s no need for parenting because the TV, school teachers, and nannies will take care of it all. I wonder why Austin was so different from where you live now.
Hi Roger,
This is one of the best articles on parenting I’ve read, and I like the fact that you and your wife had a plan right from the start.
I’ve Stumbled this and emailed it to my sister who has two sons. Great job!
Daphne,
Wow..many thanks!
I hope the article is of some use to your sister.
This is an excellent post, Roger. I am about 3 years away from having kids, but I’m saving this now … printing it off for future use. Your children are very lucky to have had parents like you and your wife.
Chania Girl,
Welcome!
I hope you enjoy being a parent as much as we have when you start having children.
@Roger - That’s not a half-bad idea! Hmmm (that’s the sound of wheels turning in my mind)
@Lisis - I think you’re more qualified to write that manual with Roger than I am!
Great post. I think that it is a struggle most of us have as parents. I for one had to realize that even though I may not see that they are learning this…other people do. Both of my children are very different at home than when they are at school…and if I were to judge them, based solely on what I see at home, I would think myself a huge failure. I thank God for parent teacher conferences…
On thing I think is vital, is to talk to your kids…talk to them about everything…even if they say nothing at all…I tell my kids about how I was bullied as a middle schooler, and how I handled it…they pick it up. Also, remember that they are their own little idividuals…destined to be what they are ment to be…Embrace it, and encourage it…for not matter what it is that they are meant to be, they will be great, if they have your love and support.
Thanks for this post…it’s just what I needed to hear…at just the right time.
Dawn,
Welcome and I’m glad you like the post!
You have an excellent point about communication. We can’t teach our children anything if the lines of communication are closed. Thankfully, we haven’t had any communication problems with our sons.
Sometimes communication problems are the result of a child trying to assert his independence. The fourth principle helped us with this because we pushed our sons to be independent as fast as possible. There was never anything to rebel against.
I think that you as an example probably had a lot to do with it as well, being a good role model as well as how you handle everyday disappointments and conflicts goes a long way to teaching your children about life. To me it is not so much telling but showing.
Everyone in my family were hard workers yet no one ever ‘asked’ me to do a single chore. I made a chore list for myself at a very young age (and looking back it was probably too much! 20 plus household and garden chores for next to nothing pay LOL)We just understood that everyone contributed to make the family run smoothly.
Oh and I love that you made no big deal of the spilled milk:)
Angie,
You’re right - we did try to lead by example and it has at least as big an impact as telling.
I’m really impressed that you did the chores. In my family, everybody worked hard, but I was never given any chores. I’m embarrassed to say I never did any.
Hey Roger, while I’m not a parent yet, I’ve been very interested in the “theory” behind good parenting, especially since we can trace many of our adult problems back to our childhood (not suggesting at all that my parents didn’t do well, just that we all have imperfect childhoods). This article is really brilliant and I hope that when I have kids I will still remember what I read!
Albert,
Thanks! You may or may not agree with my particular guiding principles. But it’s very important for you and your spouse to agree on some set of guide principles on parenting.
Wow Roger.You are a great dad.There’s no doubt about it.I think your sons are really lucky fellows to have you with them.If my dad is still in alive, he would be like you.You are reminding me of him and he passed away when i was 10.
Anyway I’ll keep these things in mind.When i have children someday,
these tips will be useful
Have a great day!
Vikum,
Thank you for the kind words!
I’m sorry that you father died when you were 10. That must have been extremely difficult for you. My father died several years ago and I miss him.
I’m sure you’ll make a great father.
Roger, what excellent, down-to-earth advice, and easy to implement. I see so many parents in the ED that are not in control of their children. These kids won’t be in control of themselves in adulthood. Perhaps I should print this post and pass it out to my parents. Really, it’s that good!
Ann Elise,
Welcome and thanks!I’ve seen similar things myself — probably we all have. It’s unfortunate that these children have parents with poor parenting skills.
Excellent post! This is exactly the path I’m taking with my 2 children. I sincerely hope, and do believe, that mine will turn out as wonderful as yours did with your parenting. Great job Dad!
Suzanne,
Welcome and thank you!
I wish you the best of luck with parenting. It’s always an adventure.