A Child Is Not Any Of These Things

A child is not a blank canvas. He is not an art project. You don't have to create him or mold him into your vision or your ideal. By the time he is born into this world, your job as the creator is done. Your job now is to help him grow as himself, not to give him a self to grow into.



A child is not a terrorist. She is not your enemy. She doesn't do things on purpose to make you miserable. If there are any battles going on, you can make sure you are on the same side as your child.

Is Independence Good Or Bad?

Here is one more topic from How to Land Your Kid in Therapy that I can't ignore: independence. On the one hand, Gottlieb talks about how kids have too many choices and too few limits, as I discussed in this post.

The advice is clearly that parents should limit how many choices their children get. We shouldn't worry about respecting our kids' wishes when they want something different than we are offering. This would be allowing... I don't know... too much independence at a young age?? We wouldn't want that.

If My Kid "Lands" In Therapy

There is an article on The Atlantic, called How to Land Your Kid in Therapy. If you haven't read it yet, I recommend it. It is a very long article and I have a lot to say about it, a few posts worth. The author, Lori Gottlieb, is a therapist and mother. When she started seeing patients, she was expecting for most of them to have complaints about their parents. She was surprised to find this was not the case for a lot of them, explaining:

These patients talked about how much they “adored” their parents. Many called their parents their “best friends in the whole world,” and they’d say things like “My parents are always there for me.” Sometimes these same parents would even be funding their psychotherapy (not to mention their rent and car insurance), which left my patients feeling both guilty and utterly confused. After all, their biggest complaint was that they had nothing to complain about!

These experiences led her to wonder: Was it possible these parents had done too much for their children?

7 "Dangers" Of Being Friends With Your Child

If you ever listen to parenting advice, you have probably heard some form of this...

WARNING: Being Friends With Your Child Is Dangerous. Do Not Attempt Under Any Circumstances.

Choosing Your Guide

You have been invited to go on a day-long hike by two of your friends, to the same place, on the same day. You have never been hiking before, so you will be relying on your friend to guide you on the difficult course. You have to choose one of them:

I Don't Think You Are a Good Mother

I'm just going to say it: I don't think you are a good mother. But I'm not saying I think you are a bad mother either. I used to think I could judge whether other mothers were good or bad. But lately, I just don't have an opinion either way. Even if I did have an opinion, would it matter to you? Does it matter if a stranger thinks you are a good mother? Or a friend or sister or parent thinks so?

It doesn't to me.

I Think I'm a Human Mother

Every day in the news, there is another article about some kind of animal mother someone is claiming to be: a dolphin, a sloth, a panda... all thanks to the original self-titled "tiger mother" Amy Chua, who got all this craziness started a few months ago.

But as Peter Gray so brilliantly writes in this article, Amy Chua is more like a circus trainer than an actual tiger mother. She is ultimately concerned with performance, with impressing others. Her children are just actors (like it or not) in her big life show. It makes me sick to see anyone in the media congratulating her for her daughter's recent college acceptances, as if it somehow justifies her method.

As a parent, I have a choice. I can choose to focus on trying to craft a "designer child," as Chua and many other parents do. If so, then everything I do now is with an eye on the future: Punishments/Rewards, Requirements, Expectations, Manipulation, Forced Lessons. It's all just in case. It's all with the hopes that my child will be some certain way. If I do all of that stuff now I can control the future.

What Happens When You Try To Change Someone

I have a feeling it's not possible to change someone else. That might seem obvious. People say it out loud all the time. Yet most of us still try. There are many, many people out there writing books and articles about how to get someone to be who you want them to be.

Especially our children. Parenting experts and amateurs alike make us feel like it is our duty as parents to mold our children into some ideal form. Like if we can just train them right, they will be right. People scare us into thinking that if we don't try to train our kids (to be polite, to take orders, to eat right, to sleep right, not to give up, to love reading, to watch the right amount of television, you name it), then we are doing them a great disservice. They will surely grow up to be mindless, selfish, friendless criminals who can't get along in the world.

But what if all the training that you do to your child doesn't change who he is at all? What if it only changes how he feels about who he is? And how he feels about you?

Five Things I Wish I Had Never Said About Parenting

I wish I had never said never. Before I had kids, I used to look at other people and how they dealt with their kids, and think I would never do that. At times, I even made the worse mistake of saying it out loud. The problem is, I didn't know. I didn't have a clue what it would be like when I had my own kids.

Quit Happens

Look at some of the popular "wisdom," in the form of one-liner clichés, about quitting:

1. Winners never quit, and quitters never win. False. First of all, winners sometimes quit. Especially after they win. Second, quitters sometimes win. Sure, maybe if you quit playing baseball, you won't win at baseball anymore. But you can win at other stuff because you aren't wasting your time playing baseball when you don't really want to. And third, what if you don't care about winning? Or what if happiness is a win for you? Then quitting something that takes away from your happiness is an automatic win.

I prefer: Quit while you are ahead. As in, if you have achieved what seems to you to be a satisfactory level of success, and you don't want to do something anymore, then it's ok to quit. Also, if you realize that you are not enjoying something, then quit before you waste too much more time doing it.

A Kid Who's Not a Quitter?

Yesterday, there was a segment on the Today Show with "parenting expert" Michele Borba, based on her article entitled How To Raise a Kid Who's Not a Quitter. First of all, I am always suspicious of anyone who writes a "How-to-raise-a-kid-who's-not" article, because I don't think it's possible to use a formula on your child to make him a certain way or not a certain way. Secondly, I recently blogged about how I Am a Quitter, and I don't think it's a bad thing. Why do people think it is important to raise "non-quitters"? Have they thought about what that means?

How to Grow a Perfect Child

Thank you, Judith Warner, for your level-headed look at parenting trends in the New York Times. Since I read Amy Chua's questionably titled  "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior", an excerpt from her book which I will not be buying, I have read many responses to it. I do not care to judge how Chua chooses to raise her children. I don't care to defend "Western mothers" as a group, mostly because I don't even think there is a well-defined group.

That is why I love what Warner has to say. She talks about this "Tough Mommy" stuff as being a trend, which happens to be convenient for Chua for book-selling purposes. The most important point in Warner's article can be found in the last paragraph, in which she writes:

Through all the iterations of Mommy madness, 'good' and 'bad,' this article of faith always remains intact: that parents can have control.

That is what it's all about: you can (must) control your child's behavior, his environment, his activities. Follow these simple rules, and you can't lose. Almost every parenting philosophy promises results in the form of what kind of person you can make your child into. And each philosophy also demonizes the alternatives and warns of the bad results that are guaranteed if you dare parent your kids any other way.