Children Need Learning, Not Relationships
In the midst of a recent public speaking adventure somewhere in the United States, a woman approached me during a break and, after telling me she thought my ideas on child-rearing were the cat’s meow, gushed, “And I have a wonderful relationship with my 8-year-old daughter! We do almost everything together!”
My mother brought me up not to insult people who mean well, so I smiled and said, “Isn’t that nice?” or something equally banal, but what I really wanted to do was grab her and shake her and scream, “MY GOD, WHY DON’T YOU WAKE UP AND GET A LIFE?! AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, WHY DON’T YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER GET ONE, TOO?!”
That a parent reports a “wonderful” relationship with a child is the self-congratulatory, feel-good sort of thing that masquerades for terrific child-rearing these days, but in truth, it’s nothing short of silly. In the first place, parents who really and truly understand and act consistently upon my advice - which is derived from the tried-and-true child-rearing of previous generations - are not likely to have “wonderful” relationships with their children until those children are well into their teens, at best. Until then, their relationships with their children are likely to be on-again, off-again, upand-down sorts of affairs.
In all likelihood, there will be many days when their children will not like them, and a good number of days when the feeling will be mutual. But, you see, children aren’t supposed to like their parents that much anyway. They are, let me remind you, supposed to want to leave home. And let me assure you, this has nothing to do with loving one’s parents.
Speaking in Nashville recently, I asked the 500-plus people in the audience to raise their hands if they truly liked their parents. Maybe 10 hands went up, which didn’t surprise me, because I didn’t like my parents that much. I wouldn’t, for example, have chosen them as friends. They annoyed me, inconvenienced me and made me angry. Then I asked this same audience for a show of hands if they loved their parents. There may have been a few who sat with both hands in their laps, but I couldn’t locate them. Yes, I too loved my annoying, frustrating parents. But I couldn’t wait to leave home, which simply means they did a good job. They convinced me I could make a better life for myself than they were willing to make for me. And, by gosh, I did!
Today’s parents, by all accounts, are not doing a good job of convincing their children likewise. When I was 20, I was married and on my own. The average age of economic emancipation in my generation was, in fact, 20. Today, the average age is approaching 25. In my time, for a child to live at home well into his or her 20s was considered indication of something very odd in the parent-child relationship. Today, it is considered normal.
And, by the by, lest you think this is because it’s far more difficult for today’s young person to get out on his own, it’s not. The researchers who discovered this trend were unable to explain it in terms of economics or the availability of jobs. They said, “The children of this generation have been given too much by parents who have been generally guilty of selfinduced nearsightedness” or words to that very damning effect.
In the second place, adults are not supposed to have wonderful relationship with children. They are supposed to have wonderful relationships with OTHER ADULTS with whom they go to restaurants and movies and on adults-only vacations and on shopping sprees and so on. Likewise, children are supposed to have wonderful relationships with OTHER CHILDREN with whom they plot against adults.
Having a “wonderful” relationship with one’s child sounds nice, but it isn’t conducive to the child learning to respect either the parent or other authority figures, which is, in the final analysis, to the child’s infinite benefit.
Today’s parents need desperately to realize, for their children’s sakes, that when it comes to child-rearing, what sounds good and what works are, more often than not, completely unrelated.