Are You Raising Your Child With A Fixed Finished Product In Mind?

Stop now and forget everything you know or have learnt about parenting. Because you are thinking about this all wrong.

As a mom living and breathing in today’s world, my knowledge of anything comes from books, Google, friends, and contemporaries. Similarly for parenting. I remember even before I got pregnant I picked up books on reading about pregnancy, what happens when a woman gets pregnant and tons of other literature on this life changing event. As a parent of two boys, I have spent a few years reading parenting books, columns, magazines, and stories in a quest to better myself as a parent. I have turned to mom support groups, to fellow moms, my parents – in a bid to learn and find out how I could win at this parenting game. After all which one of us can safely say we are bringing up kids without ever having thought about how they would turn out 18 year down the line?

That is essentially where I am going wrong – says a new article titled A Manifesto Against Parenting, published by the Wall Street Journal and written by Dr.Alison Gopnik.

This article essentially lays down one truth about bringing up children and that is that parents shouldn’t bring up their children thinking about how their ‘parenting’ will result in a finished product, in a manner akin to a carpenter tending to his work. Instead we should tend to children as a gardener tends to a garden – growing and nurturing them but with no idea of the finished product.

Throughout history mankind has always raised children by living with extended family where they were able to not only depend on the wisdom of elders but also on the support of peers. But something changed at the end of the 20th century and man started living away from these familial support systems in a bid to manage on their own. This in turn led to the rise of couples having no support system to rely on and them looking at parenting as a sort of goal oriented task similar to higher learning or career development.

Parenting is not a form of work

Let’s take a step back from busy timelines and over scheduled days to see what being a parent actually means. In today’s context we use parenting as a job that we do. To parent has become a verb in daily parlance. But shouldn’t we actually be looking at parenting as what it is at it’s most basic form – that is taking care of a child? The importance of parents in a child’s life is unmatched and that means first and foremost taking care of the child – emotionally and physically. Everything else comes later.

Be a gardener not a carpenter

What stayed with me long after I read the article were the following lines, “Caring for children is like tending a garden, and being a parent is like being a gardener. When we garden, we work and sweat and we’re often up to our ears in manure. We do it to create a protected and nurturing space for plants to flourish. As all gardeners know, nothing works out the way we planned. The greatest pleasures and triumphs, as well as disasters, are unexpected.”

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