By A.Aubanova, January 2007

What is your parenting goal?

Usually parents think they know the answer. The question sounds so obvious, so simple. What do you want to get while raising your child? Nevertheless, many don’t know the right answer. The analysis of 13661 respondents (www.43things.com/tag/parenting) to the question “What do I want – in parenting?” showed that 46% of people think that their parenting goal is to have children and a family; 30% of the respondents want to be a good parent; 7% have other reasons for parenting (like adoption etc.); 3% have a concrete image of how they will play with their children; and only 1% want to raise their children to become good people!

The details of the report are presented below. We took out of consideration 12% of irrelevant answers. The results are actually telling us that the first thing, which comes to people’s minds when they are asked about parenting is the fact of having children and being a good parent. If this is the case than there is no wonder why there are lots of parental helplessness come later on, after the kids are born, and why there are so many problems and mistakes in parenting. Everyone agrees that parenting is a hard task. But not everyone realizes that the task is hard because there is no clear goal in the whole parenting process.

Not one businessman would begin a business without having a clear goal and a business plan to accomplish that goal. However, a 16 year parenting project is not considered as serious as a business. Well, when a business fails, no one would have the crazy idea to blame the business, or a product for being so bad. Failures in business are the responsibility of the business owner. Failures in parenting is NOT considered as the complete responsibility of parents. Do you know why?

The goal – to have a baby, to have a family – is not a parenting goal. Compare with business: just to have a business license doesn’t make you a successful businessman. In business it is easy to learn – the goal is to make a profit. What makes parent a successful parent? The second group of people answered – to be a good parent – is their parenting goal. Well, what does it mean to be a good parent? It seems as parents are occupied with the idea to be good to children, do everything for their sake. However, again, compare parenting with a business project. What does it mean to be a good business man – to be good for employees, to be good to shareholders, to be good to a product?  In parenting there are three variables: parents, children and their relationship. The goal -to be a good parent – focuses only on one side of the equation, on parents, leaving the other two important variables out.  Therefore we have so many helpless parents trying to find balance between their love and discipline, not knowing what to do with their uncontrolled children.

So, what is the parenting goal?  Many books list a long number of qualities, which parents want their children to acquire during childhood. But there are few common qualities, which most parents agree with. Parents want to raise happy and smart children, who will become confident and responsible adults. If this is the case, then do we know how to fulfill this parenting goal? If you know anyone who could answer this question in one paragraph, you have been misled dramatically. The book Parenting For Everyone by S.Soloveychik has more than 250 letter size pages and this is still not enough to grasp the concept. However, it becomes much clearer to parents – in terms of what they should consider in parenting and how they could reach those parenting goals.

Tagged as: good parent, parenting, parenting goal