Parenting
You can't choose your parents. Even if you could, you'd need to wait until you're at least 18 to understand the parents you would have wanted anyway.
My parents didn't get married until after I was born. Sort of a formality. They later divorced, though I'm not sure how old I was. At a year and a half, my mother needed a break from me and didn't like my father enough to let him take care of me.
My mother had me when she was 19, two months before her 20th birthday. So at a year and a half, my mother let her aunt and uncle borrow me while she got herself on her feet. Unfortunately, no one ever know what they need to do to get themselves on their feet when they're 21 years old, at least not in today's society.
My mother was most certainly the black sheep of the family, my prototype for sure. My great aunt and uncle (mom's mom's sister and her husband) knew what my mother was becoming and they didn't like it.
Around 4 or 5 years old, my mother, again, needed a break from me, once again handing me off the my great aunt and great uncle. It was different this time, though. My aunt and uncle didn't think it was good for me to be bouncing from house to house, so they accepted me for the last time, telling my mother they weren't going to give me back if they took me this time.
So here I am today, a few days before my 24th birthday and I thought I'd take a moment to share with you my vision of the ultimate parent.
My mother, for a lack of a better term, is a liberal hippie, though she isn't really a hippie or a liberal, she's just 'outside the box'. Well if she's in her own box, I'm in a box outside of hers.
She taught me some important lessons, such as the weakness in human psyche and that I shouldn't let anyone force me into their mold.
My parents, on the other hand, model their lives after Leave it to Beaver. My parents are honest, hardworking people, with two children of their own, 10 and 12 years older than me, me brother and sister (technically, I guess they are second cousins?).
As such, they didn't really know how to raise a child like me. The biggest mistakes they made were honest mistakes. They couldn't have known better. The first mistake they made was allowing subjects to be taboo in their household. They assumed that, because I was more intelligent than their children, that I could use common sense about sex and drugs.
A few days before high school graduation, me and a friend had a celebration in my basement, with 2 18 packs of Coors Light and an eighth of some dankity dank, along with my new bowl I bought that day. Long story short, we were caught, blitzed out of minds. That was essentially the end of our relationship. Things were different after that.
I was leaving for school the following autumn with little guidance or preparation for the real world.
Knowing what I know now, I would have asked the following of my parents.
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- Leave your insecurities at the door. Your children will quickly assimilate your fears and make them their own. For my parents, anything that wasn't "normal" scared the daylights out of them.
- Encourage your child to be their own person. If father owns a company, please don't assume that your son will want to take it over someday.
- It's not about you. It's about your kid. The mother of my favorite nephew (cousin, technically) always tells me that she wants what's best for him. It's not about you. You don't know what your child wants. Encourage them to explore.
- Mistakes are a good thing. Please, for the love of god, let your child make mistakes. Remind them that a mistake is only a mistake if they refuse to correct it. Without mistakes, your child will enter the real world thinking they are god's gift to the Earth, when in reality, no one ever told them they need to work hard. See the Dunning-Kruger effect for more information.
- Your child may have interests that do not coincide with yours. Deal with it. Do not belittle them for it. I was a computer geek during high school, and my parents worried I was anti-social and gave me a hard time for being in my room so much. Now, even though I'm a college dropout, I still have a pretty good job doing system administration, all thanks to the hobby my parents hated.
- In closing, I think the biggest problem with parents is that they never self-reflect. They assume their faults are there for good, so rather than changing them, they just tell their kids not to make the same mistake.
Encourage your children to explore themselves. Teach them to become their own person. They will thank you for it down the road, and you will thank yourself.
01.23.2010. 13:43
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