What does it mean to raise a child? To successfully keep them alive until they reach a certain age that we feel comfortable saying they are on their own? Yes, keeping them alive is crucially important. You definitely shouldn’t skip that part of parenting. But that is also the baseline expectation, so assuming I strive to be more than the least amount of effective that a parent can be – what does successfully raising a child look like? Well, perhaps it doesn’t look like raising a child at all. It looks like raising an adult.
I recently heard a pastor that you aren’t raising children, you’re raising adults. The focus being on the long game, not just getting to 18 without major catastrophe. A parent’s job isn’t just to get a very tiny person to the point they are a full-sized person. A parent’s job is to make sure by the time their tiny person gets older, they are full-sized person with the skills and abilities (mental, emotional, and physical) to be a good, kind, and successful human being.
When I put it that way, this parenting stuff sounds pretty important. And really freaking hard.
The pastor took it a step further. That we aren’t just raising children, we are raising children raisers. How’s that for a long game? I’m not just turning small people into large, well-adjusted people, I’m prepping my kids to have the kind of grandchildren I want to put out into the world. Crazy to think about the kind of influence a parent can really have over the future generations. Good and bad.
Financially, poverty and wealth are both largely generational. But the same is true for moral wealth and poverty. Spiritual wealth and poverty. Philanthropic wealth and poverty. Any good thing, bad thing, or seemingly benign thing is passed down from one generation to the next, whether we try or not. They key is to try. If you don’t try to pass along the good on purpose, its too easy to pass along the bad by accident.
So I’m raising child raisers. I suppose it begs the question, can you teach a maternal or paternal instinct? I don’t know if teach is the right word, but I do think the situations you put your kids in can greatly influence their interest in if and how they a care for others. Part of it is the natural occurrence of birth order. From the day we brought home our second child, our oldest daughter has been our family’s little mommy. Sometimes it is very helpful. Sometimes she needs to be very clearly reminded that she is not actually the mother in our family. But in a way, we taught her that. We asked her for help with the baby, we put her in charge of a few things, we gave her stuffed animals that she should could be the mommy for.
You can’t have an older child without having a younger. Just the other day our younger daughter asked us if she had to have kids when she grew up. We told her no, she didn’t have to if she didn’t want to. She’s 6, so we also assured her that she has lots of time to figure that out. Lots. Then she brought it up a few days later, this time flat out saying that she didn’t want to have kids. Clearly this rattling around in her mind. Now that she is getting older, and is starting to take on more responsibility (she also asked about starting to get an allowance), has she realized how much work raising a little person to be a successful larger person is? And she has already decided she wants none of it.
On one hand, I have to say it made me a little sad to think she doesn’t want to make me a Pop Pop. But on the other hand, it is very on brand for her. She desires to live a pampered life, so the fact that she does not not want to have Pampers in her life makes total sense.
Our kids are still very young, and have no idea (I don’t think?) about where babies actually come from. So I take any decision they claim to make about it now with a very large amount of salt. Either way, it can’t change my approach to parenting them. I still need to model the behavior I want them to adopt. I still need to keep the long game in mind. I still need to avoid turning my small children in to fully grown children. I am raising women and a man.
On something of a side note, the concept of raising a man has seemed to come easier to me. My wife has always said that I’m harder on our son than I am on our daughters, and I’ll tell her that I’m raising him to be a man. That is not to say that being stricter on a kid will make them a man, or a woman for that matter, but it does get out of trap of babying your kids too much. The gendered flip-side to that coin is that my wife is unquestionably harder on our daughters, and our son is her sweet little baby.
Maybe that’s the strategy. She’ll raise women, I’ll raise man, and we’ll end up with adult children who are both fully equipped to raise children of their own and have deeply seeded mommy and/or daddy issues. A flawed plan to be sure, but Pop Pop gets his well behaved grand babies that way, so….
Perhaps this is a good time to remember that despite the power a parent yields to have generational influence, it is not about me. It is about my kids, and for them it will be about theirs. Expanding the circle more, it is about putting high quality individuals out into society in hopes that they shape it and not the other way around. I mean, have you looked around society much? Seems a lot of people have raised a lot of kids.
I Think Therefore I Dad 