Becoming A Visionary Parent

Making A Success of Life's Biggest Job

According to Mark Victor Hansen, of Chicken Soup for the Soul fame, “To be a visionary parent, we need to keep working on ourselves, becoming forever new and improved.” 

One wonders though, how many parents actually pause to reflect and reinforce their beliefs and values about parenting. Perhaps if more did so, parenting would become more of a planned activity, rather than one that is predominately performed as a reaction to events and happenings. This is why proactively working on your parenting skills, and becoming "new and improved" in this aspect of your life, is an essential part of the Project You Life Journey process.

Essential because, as Denis Waitley has written, “What you leave in your children is more important than what you leave to them.”

Adds Jim Rohn: “If you talk to your children, you can help them to keep their lives together. If you talk to them skillfully, you can help them to build future dreams.”

Lastly, C. Everett Koop, the former U.S. Surgeon General, hit the nail on the head with these comments:

Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation.

Perhaps one of the best overviews on parenting and children comes from the poet Kahlil Gibran in his poem On Children in his book The Prophet:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

As we wrote in the previous blog post about parenting, 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.