How can I stop my children from making bad decisions?
Having children can lead us toward the mistaken conclusion that they see things the way that we do and should therefore listen to our advice.
‘I just don’t understand where I have gone wrong. You teach them but they do not listen because they have the “Public Enemy” music on at full blast. You show them the road but they take the bloody path of the Inns of Court. You guide them and they run from your grasp to a Chester sports centre. You try to plan everything and nothing happens in the way that you expected.’ ‘White Teeth’ - Zadie Smith
Walking the dog to the heath one morning last week I spotted an array of discarded 11+ study guides on top of a bin. They may have been left in celebration or disappointment, but it made me think about how hard it can be for parents to know what’s right for their children, to separate their own view of the world from that of their offspring, and what happens when opinions collide.
Parenting is a subject on which I can only claim expertise on the basis that I am one, that my children are grown up, and it’s therefore reasonable to conclude that I was an attentive enough father to prevent them from sticking their fingers into live electrical sockets when they were young. The same cannot be said for my mother, who once returned home to find that my elder brother had wired our great aunt up to the mains, but that’s another story.
Most of us probably parent in ways that bear some relation to the way we ourselves were parented. This might mean that we make the same mistakes, or that those mistakes were so catastrophic for us that we resolved never to inflict them on another generation. The best we can hope for is probably that it ends up being a combination of the two.
My children would, I’m sure, describe my parenting style as ‘liberal’. I would describe my own parents in the same way. I always felt cared for, although sometimes not without condition, but there weren’t many rules, and those that did exist, were easy enough to push to breaking point and beyond.
On reflection, I could have done with my parents setting firmer boundaries in several areas of my life, but I also recognise that if they had, I’d have probably flouted them. Bottom line, it’s hard to be a parent and you often feel as if you can’t win.
When my children went for sleepovers, they would invariably return home with news of films that had been banned by other parents and video games that were off limits. But we were quite relaxed about them watching whatever they felt interested in, arguing that they’d find a way to watch it anyway and we’d rather they didn’t keep it secret when they did.
I wondered about the wisdom of our flexibility on occasion, especially when witnessing my teenage son playing video games where he was engaged in shooting prostitutes and running pedestrians over in fast cars. He works in the City now and his partner is a doctor, so I’m taking that as vindication.
My daughter ran a piece of research as an undergraduate about what influences sexual risk-taking in young adults. She found a positive correlation with perceived authoritarian parenting styles and a negative correlation with both authoritative and permissive parenting. 2-0 to the wayward parent.
All that said, I have found parenting to involve unending worry. I know I can’t protect them from the world, but that doesn’t prevent my feeling that I really, really want to.
This week’s question is an amalgam of several I’ve answered over the past few years from parents worried that their children are about to make poor life decisions, and wondering how they can intervene in such a way as to ensure the possibility of crisis is averted.
It would have saved a lot of everyones time if I’d just written back, ‘save your energy, it can’t be done,’ but that might have come across as flippant, which is not a good look for a diligent healthcare professional.
All details that might compromise the identity of the original questioners’ have been altered, but the theme is the same.
Question:
How can I convince my child that wanting to go traveling instead of focusing on gaining more experience in their job/career is not sensible?
Answer:
One of the most impactful pieces of advice I ever received about being a parent was the importance of remembering that our children are not ours, they are simply on loan until they are ready to step away and live independently.
Bringing this to mind has helped me through numerous instances of wondering about the wisdom of their decisions, and letting go when they’re not interested in my view.
There’s a paradox involved in good parenting. Loving our children often gives rise to the feeling that we want them close, so that we can influence them and keep them from harm, but this is at odds with the certain knowledge that watching them step away and live fruitful independent lives, in ways that we may not have envisaged or even approved of, is good indication that we provided the foundation that they most needed.
Having a stable base is what enables us to leave with excitement and optimism, trusting that we will be safe in our own hands.
In your question, you highlight the importance of financial security and gaining experience, so I’d like to offer two additional perspectives.
First, these aspects of life are important to you in a way that they will never be similarly important to your children, not because they don’t matter but because they are not you and will never see the world the way that you do, through the immovable prism of all your previous experience.
Second, if you step back and reframe the meaning of ‘experience’, how better to gain it than through travel? The unexpected is inevitable, and a broadening of the mind, so useful in all aspects of life, synonymous with spending time in different cultures.
But inherent in what you write is not a question of why travel might or might not be beneficial, it is more about how you can cope with a child’s desire when it is in conflict with what you believe to be in their best interests.
I can’t offer you anything that will remove the natural concerns you have about decisions made by your children that you might not have made yourself, but perhaps it will help to consider that allowing children to make choices with your blessing shifts your relationship into its inevitable next phase intentionally rather than awkwardly and grudgingly.
When you establish a safe space in which children can choose direction without fear of judgement, you help them feel more confident and secure in their instincts and natural desire to explore the world in their own way and at their own pace. This is what builds wisdom.
Handing over responsibility for decisions, however they turn out, is part of the letting go that, ironically, tends to bring children closer to us rather than creating emotional distance.
Perhaps then it becomes possible to see that a child’s desire to travel is an indication of independence bursting forth in a way that would never have been possible if you had not always loved them with the depth, diligence and commitment that you do.
That’s all for this week.
Thanks for being here. I appreciate you.