Parenting

Parenting, I have always said is the ultimate learning laboratory and refiners fire. The kids arrive without a handbook and your challenge from day one is how to optimize them, how to create an environment where they can flourish, how to imbue them with a set of values and skills that will see them through their life; all without doing it for them, all without squashing their initiative; all without taking away their moral agency to become who they should become. It is the ultimate learning experience – learning to be a parent.

As such, it was with interest that I read in the NYTimes, Living to be a parent, a recent article describing a reconfiguration of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid being updated by Kenrick to embrace a view of parenting as a desired skill set aspiration. In the words of ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2010) — If you have ever felt that your children are your life's work, then you may in fact be recognizing a high-level psychological need. Caring for your children, feeding them, nurturing them, educating them and making sure they get off on the right foot in life -- all of the things that make parenting successful -- may actually be deep rooted psychological urges that we fulfill as part of being human.









Lisa Belkin, the NYTimmes author is concerned about “the tendency to delay our children from reaching independent adulthood, which is, on any pyramid, the entire point.” Independent children but eternal relationships that is the fine balancing act and challenge to it all. Regardless, of if you aspire to be a parent or not; I am grateful for the opportunity to be a parent, to learn from being a parent, to develop the relationships that uniquely spring forth from parenthood, and to have a great partner in parenting. Parenting at the end does have everything to do with the heart.