Parenting: Life's Biggest Job

Give Children the Habits of Love, Humanity, Creativity and Spirituality. 

Passing knowledge on to one’s progeny has been an age-old concern. Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher from the 1^st Century, wrote, “Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.”

Years later, English philosopher and educator Richard Whately wrote “A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them a fortune.” 

That was probably a good philosophy for the industrial 19^th Century, when industriousness was needed to sustain one’s family. Today, in the globally linked Information Age of the 21^st Century, our children need the habits of love, humanity, thinking, creativity, and spirituality. These are the core values that will sustain our children, and our children’s children, into the middle of this century.

In more recent times, David Blankenhorn, founder and president of the Institute for American Values, stated, “The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the 20^th Century is the re-creation of fatherhood as a vital social role for men.”

The words of famed educator and former President of Columbia University Grayson Kirk certainly ring true in today's rapidly changing world: “Our greatest obligation to our children is to prepare them to understand and to deal effectively with the world in which they will live, and not with the world we have known or the world we would prefer to have.”

Of course, parenting is not something we learn in school or at university. While there are many books on parenting, none of us really have a fool-proof parenting book at hand. 

Perhaps one pundit got it right when he said, “If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.” 

Unfortunately, the cynical comments of clergyman Charles Wadsworth also have a ring of truth to them: “By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.”  

If your children look up to you as they enter the early years of adulthood, you have made a success of life’s biggest job.

This article is partially excerpted from our top-ranked personal development book Project You: Living A Determined Life, which is available in Kindle and paperback formats at Amazon.