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. 

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.