Raising A Human
Wisdom Letter #34 | The One About Parenting
Are you a parent?
Do you have a kid? Or kids?
I’m sure you know someone who has kids, and once upon a time, in a world far far away, you yourself were a kid as well.
How do you think your childhood has shaped who you are today?
Specifically, what actions of your parents lead you to become who you are? And what will you do now, raising children in the 21st century. What will you adopt from your parents’ tactics, and what will you strictly stay away from?
And will it even matter? The specific micro tactics you follow in raising your child, do they have a real impact? Isn’t it a macro game, where the broad strokes matter more than the fine lines?
What are your expectations from your kids? What vision do you have of their adulthood, what should they become, how will your parenting style shape them into the adults you want them to become?
Speaking of parenting styles, which latest fad do you follow? Do you believe in RIE parenting, or authoritative parenting, or permissive parenting, or just “go with your gut, crash, burn and learn” parenting?
The world is full of children, we are surrounded by them, billions of them, and new ones coming in every minute. Our species seems like a never ending conveyor belt of children. The birth of every child is a rebirth of two more individuals.
Her parents.
Parents who are still figuring out their own life on this planet, still trying to work out why did they take the plunge into this lifelong project at all? Still confused, scared and nervous about the infinite possibilities of the future.
They know this one decision will alter their life forever, but they have no idea how. They are placing themselves to be tremendously vulnerable in known, unknown, and unknowable ways for the rest of their lives.
And yet, they took the plunge.
In Spite of all the uncertainties and challenges that being a parent brings along with itself, they decided to go ahead and open this personalised pandora’s box anyway.
Being a parent takes a lot of courage, and it also takes a certain kind of crazy to believe that the world will be better with more creatures of your kind. It takes a lot of crazy to believe that your own life would be any better by nurturing and caring for another person over a significant part of your life. A person who has her own safety, security and selfish interest as her top priority.
Being a parent is quite complex and challenging as it is, add to that the task of sifting through loads of parenting advice you are bombarded with all the time. That is another daunting challenge.
Parenting in the 21st century means dealing with contradictory but well meaning pieces of advice on a day to day basis.
Do you co-sleep with the child or not, what age do you start to feed them solid food, when do they crawl, or walk, or talk. God forbid if they are late with any of their milestones. What about the vaccine debate? And worst of all, the screen time debate.
At what age do you introduce your child to screens. And how much visually stimulating content is okay for a child to consume on a day to day basis.
At what age do you give them their own smart device? What apps do you allow them to use, do you allow something like Snapchat on your teenager’s phone. Do you even know what snapchat is and how it works?
Being a 21st century parent means making trade-offs on a day to day basis about things you have no idea about and the world seems to be divided upon in polarising manners.
The nature of the parenting challenges previous generations faced might be similar, but the content and degree of those challenges have certainly changed a lot today.
There’s little space for nuance in any parenting debate these days.
Today on The Wisdom Project, we go looking for some nuance in parenting, we try to find balance between the extremes. We try to understand what, and how much impact, do our actions as parents have on our children’ lives. And we see how the modern “parenting project” is different from the experience of just “being a parent”.
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