Helping Our Children Reach the Future They Deserve

Ah, babies. Delightful. As May Sarton wrote in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids, "Don't forget that compared to a grownup person, every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!"

Looking at our sweetly sleeping child, we feel the power and responsibility of that potential and, with unconditional love for our bundle of joy, we are determined to be great parents. We tell ourselves that we will be the calm center on which they can depend and dream great dreams for the life entrusted to our care.

However, when our sweet dreams are interrupted at 2:00 in the morning, our parenting resolve is seriously challenged for, as Amy Leslie noted way back in 1893, "No animal is so inexhaustible as an excited infant."

And when the child begins to walk and talk and explore the world, we are made well aware that the road to parenting is not going to be smooth. The challenges come on many fronts. Every parent can relate to Fran Lebowitz when she wrote in Metropolitan Life, "Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky. . . .[and] . . . Notoriously insensitive to subtle shifts in mood, children will persist in discussing the color of a recently sighted cement-mixer long after one's own interest in the topic has waned."

That's nothing compared with the trials and tribulations of the teen years.

No, it isn't easy raising children, even though we know they will someday need to the skills to raise our grandchildren and to run the world we've left them. So how can we possibly meet this challenge? How can we fulfill our intention to help our children reach their full potential? How can we get through parenting without a nervous break-down?

We think the best approach is to first bring out the best in ourselves and to reach for our own full potential. Understanding how we can be the best we can be will make it much easier to bring out the best in our children. With self-understanding of our own strengths and frailities, we will better know how to help our children have the patience, tolerance, forgiveness, resilience, serenity, confidence, integrity, and other qualities of the human spirit they will need to live successful lives.

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