“There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give to our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

The 7 Best Gifts We Gave Our Children

There is a view of parenting that advocates giving our children every advantage possible in order to accelerate their development and increase their chances of having happy and successful lives.

There is another view that is about protecting our children from hardship and danger. 

There is still another view about giving our children the privileges and luxuries that we didn’t enjoy as children.

And there are parenting professionals out there supporting one or several of these notions. The secret to raising wonderful children, they aver, is to protect them from adversity and to give them everything possible to make their lives fuller, easier, richer, and happier. 

And by “everything,” they are talking not just about material possessions but also about such things as freedom, friendship, dignity, comfort, security, and the all-time favorite: unconditional love.

These were not the ideas that K and I embraced in our parenting. 

Our childrearing was based on a different philosophy: leaving the road before them pot-holed and bumpy, and allowing them to experience all the difficulties and challenges we ourselves had faced. 

Judging by the results of our experiment and those of our coevals that embraced the more widely held parenting philosophies, I’m glad we did what we did. Because our boys turned out to be people we both like and admire.

Here are the ”advantages” we gave to our children:

1. The Experience of Relative Poverty

K and I grew up in working-class neighborhoods. The low end. We felt the usual level of embarrassment that working-class kids feel about all the things they don’t have. Like new clothes. And lunchboxes (vs. paper bags). And spending money. When our children were young, we provided them with those same embarrassments. And when they were old enough to drive, we didn’t buy them cars, as some parents did. If they wanted a car, they could pay for it with the money they earned after school. So they drove the sort of cars we drove when we were in high school: junkers. (I still fondly remember watching Number One Son scrubbing the torn plastic seating of his 20-year-old pickup truck before his first date.) 

2. Second-Class Status

We grew up in families that had double standards. And we imposed those double standards on our boys. Parents had privileges that children were denied. Children had rules that parents were exempt from. Until our boys were old enough to leave home and fend for themselves, they had to accept their position as second-class family members. We could eat what we wanted. They could not. We could go to bed when we wanted to. They went to bed when we told them to. As they got older, we gradually gave them more autonomy – but only if they earned it by acting like responsible adults. The bottom line was always an absolute: We were the parents. They were the kids. Our family was not a democracy. And they were not our equals.

3. Insecurity

When you grow up as K and I did, you become instinctively insecure. You recognize that sometimes things roll your way. Sometimes the world eats you for lunch. C’est la vie, we explained to our kids. We did not then and do not now view insecurity as a bad thing. We saw it as necessary for survival in the real world. We made sure our boys understood that they were guaranteed nothing. That anything they got must be earned. And that there were dangers lurking that we could not protect them from – some of them inescapable. They needed to understand that life is tough, and if they wanted to succeed, they had to learn to overcome obstacles. Again and again.

4. Deprivations

Our children were not free to do what they wanted. We (mostly K, to her credit) put restrictions on just about everything they enjoyed – from watching TV to playing video games to hanging out with their friends to going out on weekends when they were in high school. We knew that they would push whatever boundaries we set, and so we made those boundaries very firm.

5. Disapproval

Like most parents, we wanted our children to succeed in their work – as students and in their extracurricular activities. We never made them feel that we expected them to excel at anything in particular, but we made it clear that we expected them to approach everything they did in earnest. When they did, we rewarded them with well-earned praise. When they did not, they got what they knew they deserved: our disapproval.

6. Punishment

K was a big believer in reasonable but consistent sanctions for undesirable behavior, which included speaking disrespectfully to adults and treating their peers unkindly. Our boys’ behavior mattered to us. Their manners mattered, too. So we used punishment for the bad as well as praise for the good to raise our children. 

7. Conditional Love

Where did it come from – the idea that unconditional love is a good thing? The meaning is patently bad. How does it do either party – the lover or the beloved – any good? It makes a masochist of the one and a solipsist of the other. 

Parental love that is unconditional is irresponsible. It is the act of yielding when withholding is called for. It says: You can do whatever you want. When people say they love their children unconditionally, they actually mean that they refuse to take on the responsibility of doing the tough things that a parent must do to raise a responsible, affable, and admirable human being.

 

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