From a review of Edward Kennedy's posthumous memoir:
Kennedy tells us that when he was still a child his father once let him know that he had a choice between living "a serious life" and a "non-serious life."
"I'll still love you whichever choice you make,” his father, the bootlegger, wrote. "But if you decide to have a non-serious life, I won’t have much time for you."
Imagine as a child hearing that from your father! I think the better emphasis is personal happiness and fulfillment. But does the parent's emphasis even matter?
Not as much as most people think. Bryan Caplan, in his now gated article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes:
The punch line is that, at least within the normal range of parenting styles, how you raise your children has little effect on how your children turn out. You can be strict or permissive, involved or distant, encouraging or critical, religious or secular. In the long run, your kids will resemble you in many ways; but they would have resembled you about as much if they had never met you.
There is plenty of other work on this topic; twin studies are some of the most interesting. I am not optimistic that it will become mainstream thinking in the near term. The parenting industry — and it is an industry, all those books and tapes and classes on how to groom the next Einstein — is large and profit hungry.
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Here are all my links on parenting. Here's why I love my parents. Here is the key to life in one simple flowchart.
I think that’s nicely put. If children anyway mirror their parents in the long term, it relieves the parent a lot. It’s a lot easier to raise kids if they are not looked upon to retain control (in the guise of giving advise to kids) assuming they know what’s best for the kid.
But to whom does the kid first run to if (s)he is in trouble?
Parent-Child relationship in fact is and should be a two way street.
Children would hesitate to get back to parents when they are disturbed because of their own independent actions. That is worrisome because if they turn to wrong people for counsel, they could get mired in trouble all the more deeper, from where it could be well nigh impossible to get out.
Agree 10000% about the parenting industry. My wife and I are expecting arrival of our first baby in about a week and have learned first hand how aggressive that industry is.
“Lifted” key to life flowchart and posted it to my Facebook. My friends loved it. I did attribute it to you.