Parenting Guides
This has been a challenge the maze of parental advice one can read can be overwhelming especially for the new first-time parent. Everybody has their opinions on what the new initiate-parent needs to do: read X, follow Y, do Z when A.
Simple heuristics are given and much of the research seems contradictory. This is not easy to determine, using the research tools we have unless we do strict experiments in which peoples lives are utterly controlled and ruined for the advancement of science, the alternative are statistical studies in which the choice of the controls and assumptions are based on the outcome that the researcher might want to explore and argue for.
Commonalities
Weirdly enough for most of these guides there seem to be a large amount of commonality, these are:
- Leadership skills.
- Relationship Management
- Values and Education
Leadership Skills
An interesting list came up once on Authoritative parenting and the list was basically a copy (with word changes) on how to be an effective team leader.
- Setting clear and rules and boundaries (goal management)
- Setting Expectation (Performance Management)
- Listening to Input from stake holders (team members or children, Communication)
- Providing Positive or Constructive feedback
All in this while also holding your self accountable to the same rules you set, not a rule for thee but not for me scenario where I have seen most parents take this approach - ie: be what you want your children to be. This is effective leadership, this is the Servant Leader I keep reading about in Agile management or on how to manage creative teams. It is quite an eye opener.
Relationship Management
This is from Gabor Mate's work "Hold on to your kids" - the parent nowadays has major challenges that confront their role as caretaker of the child but also how the child views and relates to the parent - ie: Attachment. Mate's work basically is suggesting that the attachment process of children in today's society has been made to work against the parent and the child. Children seek their growth in others like them, this means that they don't view their parents as a valuable person they can ask. This is also because the parent also just assumes their role, they are taught to fight their instincts - Look at co-sleeping what seems to be a fairly natural state yet on western countries it is looked down upon. Another example are programs like Super Nanny, in which the kid is demeaned an exemplification of treating your child as an other, not another human. So Mate argues that parents need to evaluate how they relate to their children as if they were in a relationship. An example he gives is how parents feel once their child grows up and they are locked out of the lives of their children - ie: they are committing a form of relationship infidelity. I am still reading through much of his book, however Mate's work seems to align with Attachment Parenting. This might be a misleading statement as Mate is plainly talking about the role of attachment from the child, and is based on the ideas of Attachment Theory rather than Seer's work on Attachment Parenting.
Values and Education
This is tricky - I've been reading a bit on Montessori teaching, and to me it resonated on two fronts
A) I experienced the best teaching experience when I was let to explore things by my self.
B) I tried to teach in this very same manner, trying to inspire students to try learn by themselves on the topic.
This is also reflected by what my wife tells me on how she found on how to get students to learn. My wife and I found our selves trying to fight the resistance and sapping of the love of learning by the school system on students - some times students are damaged by perceptions of themselves to be inadequate, when they are quite the opposite and needed just a bit more help to get them moving and end up surprising themselves on how capable they are. The education method we have nowadays is pretty outmoded, it has been since time immemorial (there are paintings of universities in the Middle Ages with sleeping students in the lecture theatre, a very persistent problem today). There is also this aim to be catering to the lowest common denominator, year on year students seem to enter university with less knowledge than the last - for example students studying medicine or science while hating maths. Maths being the exemplar of getting beat downs on complexity - given that our educators seem to confuse computation and mathematics, and now want to make everybody a software-engineer? Never mind that programming is closely related to mathematics. However people don't know what Maths is, my guess programming is going nowhere.
Then Values - Mate's book also suggest that failure of passing values to the next generation are based on the ideas of Attachment, Montessori relates it to children not being able to apply these social lessons in the education system - They are all forced to compete against each other. The best way I felt is when I taught people on how to do something and they exceeded what I not only taught them, but my skill. Children in modern education are not taught this, never experience this passing of information. Some common patterns I've read from very successful people has been this - Parent teaches child, child teaches younger sibling, or younger children.
Conclusion
Welcome to parenthood, with today's age being a parent you have many things competing for your time, but for me at least the path is less blurry. Following one's instincts is not a sin, it has worked for humanity for thousands of years. Treat your children with respect as part of a team, that is your home, you are the servant leader (in more ways than one would care to admit), they have innate human value and treating that with respect is key. With respect means that you have a relationship with the child that a parent has to constantly work on.