You’ve probably heard the loyal, adoring son unabashedly declare, “My Father is greater than I.”
The greatness of some parents can never be surpassed by their children’s.
Now contrast that with the similarly devoted, adoring parent proudly declaring, “My child is greater than me.”
The greatness of some parents—and this is where you and I come in—can be surpassed by their children’s. In fact, it should be surpassed by their children’s greatness.
Stay with me, please.
“My child is greater than me” can be another way of simply saying, “I made many child greater than me.” Every parent’s most active, imperative pursuit in childrearing should be conducting themselves, and raising their children, in ways that will make them greater than they are!
Let me be candid, if you will.
It’s almost criminally dangerous to make our children worse than you are. It’s an awfully easy thing to do, but it’s absolutely unacceptable. The world doesn’t need a worse version of you.
Depending not the sort of person you are, it’s somewhat tolerable if you make your children as good as you are. If the world can put up with you now, it probably can put up with your children. Insert smiley face here.
A lot of us have been bogged down by some excess baggage. Instead of adding more to that baggage for our children, or simply passing it along to them as it is, we can learn from our bad experiences and strive to ensure that our children aren’t weighed down as much as we are. As the saying goes, Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
If you regret the types of friends and social environments that got you into the bad habits you’re now struggling to shake, you should want your children to avoid those types of friends and social environments in the first place. They will be better off than you are, and their chances for greatness will increase exponentially.
Some of us hated being yelled at by an upset parent at the local store. If we do the same thing to our children, we risk making them just as “good” as we are or even worse than we are. Instead, we should strive to be more polite to our children at the local store.
If you think you’ve wasted precious time over the years playing largely unproductive video games—once unequivocally considered childish—you should want your children to not get caught up in such time-killing addictions. Save them from what can average out to 21 full days of gaming each year.
Some of us credit our intellect, ability to think deeply, and concentrate on the limited distractions of the 90s, 80s, 70s, 60s, or 50s. I dread encountering dumber and more distracted versions of ourselves in the future. Try limiting certain uses of technology like google, AI, memes, social media, etc. Consider investing in a bookshelf for your home, for starters. People used to love physical books so much that selling them online in the 90s made a billionaire out of some enterprising vendor from Bellevue, Washington.
With such parental experience we can draw from, our children are automatically set up for greater success in life than we probably were! They truly have the potential to become greater than we are! And for the sake of the future, it’s imperative that they turn out greater than us!
It has to become a goal of parenting—something we are always thinking.
And it requires intense effort.
The cynic in me has seen parents interacting with their children in ways that seem to guarantee that those children will turn out worse than their parents. It’s a scary thought. There is such a thing as entropy. Your backyard always gets worse and worse, until that one day of intense effort.
The optimist in me knows that even though our children may proudly declare that we are greater than they are, the efforts we expend raising them, informed by our own experiences, would actually have made them greater than us.
For most of us, that’s the only good option available.
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