Plant the Seed then learn how to let them grow

RAISING CHILDREN, WHAT A MIND GAME!

When to say something, when to shut up. When to act, when not to act.

There are so many things you want for your children, but oh how you can screw it up without realizing it, sometimes not until unnecessary damage has been done.

What I have learned in the last 30 years is this is a very fluid process, like floating down the River of Life on many different constantly changing currents. From the moment they hop on their own inner tube, it is a letting go process on your end, the parent, letting them dare to float by themselves. From the instant they log their first view of the world, it is theirs, and not yours to claim.

Let’s call your kid a seed that you have planted. It has a genetic code that came from you, but there are so many variables in the environment that will affect the seed as it grows such as water, sun, and chemicals, etc. As this seed grows and uses the variables for what works for THEM, your control over that seed’s growth becomes less and less and that seed, now a growing plant learns to control those variables themselves.

It gets to a point, usually adolescence, that if you suggest to the seed how they should be growing, the growing plant feels like you are not satisfied with what your adolescent’s own cultivated growth is; an ‘unacceptance’ of what growth that seed has worked hard to obtain. So many times I have heard, “Nothing I do is good enough for you!”, which is of course far from the truth as we are all proud of our children and want only ‘the best’.
It seems it is at this point, we are tasked as parents to go to the other side of the River of Life, and just work on building a bridge for that once fragile and new seed, now a formed plant with it’s own structure to return to you whenever THEY choose. They will come to you when they need or want some nourishment, but if you continue to try and force your own environmental conditions on that plant it will wither shrivel and die, or transplant somewhere else.

In a conversation with my father a few years back, I asked him, “Do you think the world is in a good place right now?” When he answered, “No”, I said, “Then why do we keep expecting the next generation to do the same things we have done for the last 100 years and then hope the world gets any better?” It maybe uncomfortable to watch this ‘Next Generation’ do things differently than we think we would like them to do, but it may just possibly be the thing the world needs to get back on a better current than the one it is presently in.

So build that bridge across the River of Life to that growing plant; your children; the next generation; get to know who they are today, not who they were, or who you think you want them to be. Chances are, they will come up with something more astounding than you ever could have imagined.