Parenting

This is gonna' be great. I'm about to do a rant about parenting, despite being a 22 year old male with no parenting experience, and not even so much as a little brother that I had to care for growing up through the tough time that was my parents' hilariously exploded marriage (we'll save that for another post).

Parenting.

Stop, you're doing it wrong. (I find it difficult to progress from here, as I sit staring at the words I just typed for 5 minutes, noting that I'm making a huge over-generalization and wondering how I should justify that bad, over-generalization)

Parenting is not for raising a little clone. Parenting is not for living out your hopes and dreams. Parenting is not for raising a warrior for your causes. Parenting is not for having another pair of hands to work for you. Parenting is not for hoping that they will, one day, become rich so that you can live off of them.
In short-
Parenting is not a means to an end.

You are creating a life that is its own unique existence. One that will inevitably grow to disagree with you on some things and agree with you on others. One that will have a separate opinion on love, religion, life, war, and many many other things. Regardless of what you teach them, they will have some questions and some differences. Embrace that beforehand.

When you raise a child, instill your moral values through your actions. Let them come to understand the world through appropriate action. Once they have reached an age of intellectual independence, let them make the big decisions on their own, but be there to guide them insomuch as answering the questions that they have.

Be there as a safe base, but do not control. Be there without being distant. Be the healthy middle-ground. Your independent child will inevitably come to make a choice about their career and their religion and their relationships and their (etc.) on their own. Let them, but ensure that they have a reason. Ensure that they have properly asked the important questions and indeed, answered them as well. Help them to answer these questions.

Be the help. Be the guide. Be there to ask and to lead to the answers, but do not answer for them. Otherwise, they will not learn to answer them on their own.

Children are not you. They are their own. Let that flourish.

-
Waddles