5.8 - Parenting

We go to school for ten to twelve years to get fundamental knowledge. Then four to six more years of university to get a degree and a profession. Then we have children, and we simply assume we somehow know how to raise them.

This is one of the strangest gaps in modern life. The highest-stakes work you'll ever do, the work that will shape another human being for the rest of their life, is the one we approach with almost no preparation. We read books on how to cook better, run faster, work smarter, and improve our golf swing. But almost nobody reads a single book on how to actually raise a child.

Dedicate time to it. Parenting is a craft. There are people who have thought hard about it for decades. There are approaches that work much better than the defaults you absorbed from your own upbringing. Read.

Two books that are particularly worth your time:

• Positive Discipline by Jane Nelsen. The clearest practical guide to a discipline approach that's neither punitive nor permissive. The core idea: kindness and firmness at the same time. Setting limits clearly, while preserving the dignity of the child. Most parents oscillate between being too harsh and being too soft, often within the same hour. This book gives you a third option, and it works.

• Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff. The author traveled with her young daughter to live with Mayan, Inuit, and Hadzabe families to see how cultures with extraordinarily well-adjusted, helpful, calm children actually raise them. The contrasts with modern Western parenting are revealing. The book reads like a memoir but contains a complete alternative philosophy of parenting.

These two books together will change how you parent.

Kids are mirrors too

Everything from Chapter 5.1 about the mirror principle applies, in a different form, to children.

Your kids are not just smaller versions of generic humans. They are deeply attuned to you, watching everything, picking up on emotional states you don't think they can read, learning what's normal by watching what you do every day. They mirror your patterns back at you, often before you've recognized the patterns yourself.

The triggers your children produce in you are not really about them. They're about you. When your child does something that makes you furious in a way out of proportion to the actual event, that fury is almost always about something older than the moment, something from your own childhood being reactivated by something your child is doing now.

This is hard and useful information. The same internal work that benefits your romantic relationship benefits your parenting. Working through your own material makes you a calmer, more present parent. Failing to work through it produces a parent who keeps repeating their own parents' patterns and doesn't quite know why.

Three principles you should know about

If there's a short list of the most useful working principles for everyday parenting, these are three of the best.

Kids want to feel grown up. Most behavior problems with children, especially school-age children, come from feeling small, dependent, talked-down-to, and not taken seriously. The fix is to give them the feeling of being grown up, repeatedly and explicitly. Notice and name the grown-up things they do. Give them responsibilities that match (or slightly exceed) their actual capacity. Talk to them the way you'd talk to an adult, not the way you'd talk to a baby. They will rise to the version of themselves you see in them.

Kids want to learn. Children are learning machines by default. The challenge isn't motivating them to learn; it's not crushing the natural curiosity they were born with. Create opportunities for them to learn things, at the right level for where they are. New experiences. New environments. New challenges. New questions. Let them try, fail, and figure things out themselves. What kills the learning drive in children is parents and schools doing too much for them, too fast, too soon.

Kids want to feel free. They don't actually need total freedom, which would often be dangerous, but they need the feeling of freedom. The simplest tool for giving them that feeling without giving them inappropriate latitude is to offer choices. Instead of "put on your jacket," try "do you want the red jacket or the blue one?" Instead of "eat your vegetables," try "do you want broccoli or carrots?" The outcomes you care about (jacket on, vegetables eaten) stay constant. What changes is that the child experiences themselves as the agent of the decision. The resistance drops, the cooperation rises, and the child gets the developmental experience of making real choices, on a scale appropriate for them.

These three principles handle a surprising amount of daily parenting friction. Most negotiations that go badly with kids go badly because the child is feeling small, bored, or controlled, and you can change all three of those states without changing your underlying expectations of them.

The work behind all of it

The deepest principle in parenting is the same as in partnered relationships: keep working on yourself. Read the books. Sit with your own triggers. Heal what your own parents passed down to you so you don't pass it down again.

Kids don't need perfect parents. They need parents who are conscious enough to notice when they're getting it wrong, repair it when they do, and keep working on themselves so they can keep showing up. The relationship to your children will be the most demanding ongoing practice of your life. Treated as a practice, it will also become the most rewarding.