Raising Children Or Raising Cain

When you raise children to satisfy your own needs, you can do real damage. A child's confidence erodes, along with the sense of who they are and what they are worth. Some kids turn into people pleasers. Others become renegades. Either way, they end up skilled at managing how the adults around them feel instead of figuring out how to look after themselves. They learn to adjust their behavior so a caregiver is happy, or sometimes miserable, and both roads lead away from knowing what they actually need.

Think about the old talk around "preacher's kids." The saying goes that they are angels or they are devils. One group follows the script, meets every expectation, and grows into the devout Christian, Catholic, Jew, or Muslim the parents hoped for. The other group runs hard in the opposite direction. It does not play out this neatly every time. It happens enough, though, that people keep clicking their tongues and muttering about how sad it is that the reverend's or the rabbi's children carry on that way.

A parent who can only feel successful through a child's achievements is standing on shaky ground. Letting go of that is not easy. Raising kids well and building your own successful life can pull against each other, and real sacrifices may get in the way of personal goals. Raising children well is itself an accomplishment, but parents don't always see that what fits one person won't fit another. No child is a copy of a mother or father. Plenty of children who turn out well are living lives that look nothing like their parents' lives, and they are content there.

Unconditional love is what a child deserves. Not the "I'll love you if" version. A parent can hate a particular thing a child does and keep loving the child through it, though that takes some maturity. People reach that maturity at different speeds: some early, some late, some right on schedule. Part of it traces back to the example their own parents set. The other part is whether the parent can love themselves, which comes more easily to someone who was given unconditional love as a kid.

This kind of love grows only when you give it away. Give more and you get more back. And yes, I can already hear the objection. You are thinking there are moments you have to withhold love to stop a child from harming themselves. Sometimes the most loving move is drawing a boundary that, on the surface, looks like you have pulled your love back. Handing a child break after break can just push them further into whatever is going to hurt them badly down the road. Holding that line takes enormous love. It may be the hardest sacrifice of all, because it means accepting the chance that you could lose them for good.

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