Parental Rulemaking Rules

When I was growing up, I was an expert on parenting. No, I didn’t raise younger siblings or cousins, or even babysit. But I could give you a detailed critique of all of my parent’s failings. My friends and I, like kids everywhere, would hold conferences of junior parenting researchers where we could compare our observations of parental shortcomings. Now, I knew that I had it pretty good, but I still bristled at what I considered unfair judgments and excessive punishments.

Once I grew up, and began thinking about having kids of my own, I started strategizing about how I would do things, largely based on what I had identified as the successes and mistakes my parents made. Yep, I’d thought it through — no mistakes forthcoming.

And then my son was born. And I realized that parents lie and pretend about a lot of things — Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, not being freaked out about killing that big, ugly hairy bug. But those all pale in comparison to the Big Lie: the myth of parental competence.

From a kid’s point of view, parents are wise and learned, and even the decisions that seem unfair have the illusion of having been arrived at through careful deliberation resembling Supreme Court proceedings. Of course the actual process is one of making it up as you go along. While it should be obvious, kids don’t realize that almost every situation is a new one to the parent. Even when my daughter was born, and I thought that at least now that I’ve been through it once it should be easy, I soon realized that different kids need different decisions.

Somewhere along the way, I realized that parenting wasn’t about having a lengthy, detailed rulebook that you pull out to deal with every situation that comes up. Instead, it’s about having some guiding principles that you do your best to follow. And as I thought about what principles my wife and I try to use to guide us, I saw that they were the same ones that our parents had used:

· Your children’s happiness is more important than your own

· Be kind and respectful to those around you

· Cherish learning

· Life is better with a dog

Now, I’m sure there are many mistakes that my kids could tell you I’ve made. I could list quite a few of them myself. But my hope is, despite the mistakes I’ve made, when the time comes for them to raise their own children that they, too, will be guided by those values that my parents passed down to me.

Especially the one about the dog.