Education matters

Raising children is hard.  There are no rule books, no short cuts, no simple answers and no definitive way of doing things. Even though we want them to grow up to be doctors or teachers or pilots, there is no guarantee that they will and even if we give them the best possible start in life by sending them to the perceived to be ‘best schools on the island’; there is nothing to say that they won’t grow up to be idiots, just well-educated ones.

In fact, who is to say what is the right way or the wrong way of doing anything regarding raising children.  A lot of it is pot luck, but it is fair to say that most good quality parenting is common sense and probably, like most things in life we learn how to raise our children by the way we were raised by our parents, who in turn learnt what they knew from their parents and so on and so forth.

Recent studies regarding generational parenting have begun to show that parenting trends and adult lifestyle choices are much psychologically influenced than perhaps first thought. 

For example, if a parent blurs the lines between having healthy contact with their children and grandchildren by becoming an overbearing influence or weakly giving in to their adult children’s demands, it will do one of two things:

-Drive the children as far away as possible

-Encourage children to take advantage of their parents because it is so easy to do through the misconceived idea that they are ‘close’.

But why would a parent do that? One glimpse into his or her childhood might see distant parents who cared not for spending time with their children and a child growing up who was determined not to do that to their children when they had them.

So, again, who is to say what is right or wrong, but common sense would suggest that the grandchildren who see their grandparents being taken advantage of will be highly likely to expect that it is acceptable to do themselves.

I recently watched a very truthful movie called Parenthood in which all different generations in one family are analysed through their interactions and relationships with each other. One of the characters, acted by a very young Keanu Reeves, plays the teenage boyfriend of one of the family’s daughters. Initially he is mistrusted and disliked because he doesn’t fit in with the conventional idea of the ‘right kind of boy’. But when he helps the confused parents to understand what their young son is going through as he approaches puberty, he delivers a very telling speech about the influence of his father who used to wake him up by throwing lit cigarettes at his head. 

It is easy to become a father and practically anyone can do it. However, being a mother or father and a being a parent are two entirely different things. How our children turn out may be pot luck and we may not always get what we hoped for, but parenthood doesn’t end when our children turn 18. It is a job for life and just as our children learn and grow so must we as parents because learning, evolving, developing and maturing as a person is not something that stops at school or university. It is something that life gives us opportunities to do all of the time and when it does we must take those chances because everyone in our family benefits from our growth.