Many of us as parents want to help our kids be "good" people and have "good" jobs and have "good" families and really just be "good" people. So how do we do that? How do we help our kids be "good?"
I think that is the wrong question entirely. I think we should be asking the question how can we help our kids be GREAT? Don't you want your child to be great and not just good? I think most parents want greatness from their kids but have fallen for the myth that only a few people in the world can be great. Yes, I said that is a myth.
There are many myths when it comes to raising our kids and helping them through life. I think the good or great myth is a huge myth. Most of us don't even realize that it is a myth we believe, but we do. We think "if I can just help them become a good person then I will have succeeded," but what we are really saying to ourselves is "I know they probably won't be great, so I will just settle for good." You see, we look at famous people and think "Man, I wish my son or daughter would be like that one day." but in reality they may be but they may just not be famous for it.
We have begun to equate fame and greatness in our culture and they are not the same things. Just because someone is famous doesn't make them great, and just because someone is great doesn't mean they will be famous. The idea that our kids will not be great has led us to the place where parenting is in the US today. It is a little thing I like to call "friendship parenting."
Friendship parenting defined - Friendship parenting is when we as parents want to be liked by our kids so much that we will forgo anything that might hurt their feelings so they won't be mad at us. (i.e. Johnny I know I said you couldn't have your phone back for two weeks and it has only been three days but you can have it back.)
When we begin to go down the path of friendship parenting it leads us to live out the "good myth." When we live in a state where we are just trying to make our kids happy, we no longer have the ability to influence their lives. I was talking with a parent the other day and as we were talking she said she wasn't happy with things her child was purchasing on their phone. I was shocked by that because I'm pretty sure this 12 or 13-year-old doesn't have a credit card to be able to make mobile purchases. My thought was "why are you giving her the ability to do that?" But I knew the answer. She, like many parents wants her child to like her.
I talked to another parent recently that said her child was out past curfew and didn't let her know where he was. "Their phone was dead," this parent said. "I should have checked their phone but I didn't think of it at the time." Then she said something that was profound for parents in our culture right now. She said she was going to be dropping him off at the prom the next weekend because she couldn't trust he was going to do what he was suppose to. I wanted to put her picture on a billboard and shout from the roof tops because this parent gets it. They understand the danger of "friendship parenting."
We have to move beyond the point where we are more concerned with whether or not our kids like us and become focused on whether or not they are going to be great or just good. I want my kids to be great, and like it or not, that is going to take work. We are going to have to work hard to help our kids learn what it means to be great.
We have to help them learn what media to take in, what friends to have, who to date, what to say and how to act. We have to help our kids learn how to make the right choices in life and sometimes that means we have to upset them because of the consequences we give them based on their actions. There is another myth that sometimes leads us to friendship parenting and it says this - "Labor ends when the baby is born." In other words, the work is only starting when the baby is born and from that point we have to continue to work to help make our kids great. Don't lose heart, they can be great, but they need our help and friendship too, but the friendship should never outweigh the parenting.
We may hurt their feelings and make them mad, but in the end, our kids can be great if we will be the parents they need us to be.
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