Good Parent, Good Kid?

Can you handle the truth about parenting?

Most parents want to believe that if they do everything right—are the world’s best parent—then their kids will be perfect. We want to know that what we do, or what we don’t do, is of utmost importance in forming our children into responsible, respectful and resourceful human beings.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is that no matter how good a parent you are, your child is still capable, on any given day, of doing something despicable, disgusting and depraved.

That’s the cold, hard truth that we don’t want to face. That’s the reason why good kids can come from truly horrible homes. That’s the reason why kids from good homes sometimes go off the rails and do terrible, bad things.

Image courtesy of digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So what’s a parent to do when faced with the cold, hard truth? The right thing, of course.

The right thing is not enrichment classes, team sports, individual sports, after school activities, good grades, etc., etc., and so forth. Those simply teach a child skills. The right thing is much harder than the helping a child excel at something.

The right thing is teaching our children the value of human life, the value of responsibility, the value of respectfulness, the value of being thoughtful, kind, considerate, compassionate, and reverent.

The right thing is making our children feel bad when they misbehave, so that they will choose a better path. The right thing is to make our children responsible for their actions by levying appropriate punishments for misdeeds.

The right thing is realizing that, while we should do our very best to raise our children to be upstanding citizens, our kids have the final say in how they turn out. In other words, as parents, we don’t raise our child. The child raises the child. We simply provide the framework for him to do so.

Parents should do the right thing not for the immediate rewards, but for the intangible future. What will you do?

Until next time,

Sarah