21 Parenting Ideas I Find Useful (& You Probably Would Too)
As I stood by the hospital window holding my newborn in my arms, it felt like I was bestowed with something very, very special. I thought, this is it now. No more games. No more horseplay. No more fooling around. This isn't about me anymore. What has been entrusted to me, I honour with a total commitment of my life: To lead, to empower, to love.
This sentiment is hardly unique to me.
All parents share the same feeling.
Yet, at some point, we’ve failed. We’ve failed to love them. We’ve failed to protect them. We’ve failed to uphold morals and lead with the values we swore to exemplify.
And yet, life doesn’t just stop. We can't just hit the reset button if we messed up. No one is going to take over our duties when we decide that enough is enough. How far can we go on pretending that our kids will eventually "get it", and that everything at home is alright when it clearly…isn't?
But we keep going. And we keep going till we're dead.
No one becomes the perfect parent overnight—which, by the way, isn't the point of this whole parenting thing. What matters is that, as Mathieu would tell me, we try to be a little better than before. So why not take the effort—regardless of our imperfections, regardless of our tiredness—to build upon the lessons we learn everyday from managing the business of our family and watching them grow?
So that’s what today’s post is about—me sharing some of the most interesting and thoughtful ideas about parenting I’ve picked up along the way. This is a compilation of my conversations with people, the books I’ve read, the podcasts I’ve listened to, my own daily observations, and of course, my first-hand experiences as a mother.
I'm not saying that by learning from the adventures of others, your situation will turn. What I'm saying is...it helps.
There’s a big difference between having a kid and being a parent. “Responsibility doesn’t just end at conception," Barack Obama once said, "Giving birth to a child does not make you a father or a mother. It does not make you a person with the ability to make a child. It’s at the courage to raise a child that makes you a parent.”
They don’t have to earn your love. Lyndon Johnson had a distinguished political career: He was Senate majority leader before the age of fifty, elected vice-president and then president, and held tremendous power for decades. But prior to all that, he grappled with a never-ending wave of emotional torment in the early years of his life. As a young boy, Johnson was plagued with two opposing forces from his mother—in one moment, he could be her favourite child, and in the next, be utterly despised. She made him feel like he was the most important person in her life, yet the love she exhibited was conditional on his success. When he fell behind in school, he decided to quit violin and dance lessons to focus on his school work. “For days after I quit those lessons she walked around the house pretending I was dead,” Lyndon said, “And then I had to watch her being especially warm and nice to my father and sisters.” Once again, this is a melancholic reminder to us parents: Nothing is more damning to a child than the feeling of deficiency and emotional deprivation. Don't ever give the slightest impression that they're required to pay their dues. Know that there is nothing they have to do to earn your love.
Leave all baggage at the door. No job in the world demands a person to switch between emotions as fast as a parent. Yet, Randall Stutman says, that is what is expected from us. “Your job as a leader is to make really fast transitions. Your job is to not carry the last conversation…and if that means you need to settle yourself and sit out in your car for a couple of minutes before you walk in the house so you can be a [parent], then that’s what you need to do. But your job is not to walk into that house and carry with your anything that came before.”
You’re a piece of inspiration. “To be a grown up,” Brad Montague wrote in his fascinating book Becoming Better Grownups, “means to inspire kids to make them want to be a grown up.”
Demonstrate what it means to love your work. Paul Graham wrote that the most dangerous liars can be a kid’s own parents. “If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living," Graham writes, "you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring.” The very notion of work-life-balance can be misleading: How are our kids suppose to learn the idea of hard work and work ethic and passion and grit if all they ever see is how their parents treat their work with contempt? We're not to grind for our jobs at the expense of our families, but exemplify what it means to pour passion and love into your everyday life. “A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house.”
There is a convenient speed for growth. Tire magnate Harvey Firestone once pointed out that companies that get business too quickly acts just like a child does who gets money too quickly. What’s this whole competition about learning as quickly as possible? A four-year old isn’t required to learn calculus! Neither is a six-year old supposed to recite a whole page of Pride and Prejudice. Even if they did so with ease, where’s the satisfaction? In them? Or in us? Don’t let the allure of speed trick you into thinking that our kids must prove themselves now in order to secure their future. What I'm saying is, there’s a time and season for everything. There's a convenient speed for growth. Most great things in life—parenting, business, relationships—gain their value from two things: patience and admiration. Patience to let a child grow according to the their needs, and the admiration of the human they grow into.
You both need time off. A woman once walked up to Michaeleen Doucleff when her daughter was acting up. “Your daughter must be sick of you,” the woman said, “That’s why she is misbehaving. [She] needs to be around other kids. You need a break.”
You’re not in the enforcement business. When it comes to business, fear can be a powerful motivator that could lead to unprecedented speeds of innovation. You're dealing with problems so urgent, so vital, that money and manpower are removed as obstacles. Just look at how quickly pharmaceutical companies developed the COVID-19 vaccine. A similar mindset is often placed upon our kids. Just think about how your boss would instil fear at the workplace. What has it achieved? Have you ever done anything so willingly (and without grudge) because someone exerted force over you? The last thing we want is for our kids to regress into a deep hole filled lacking with love and self-confidence. It's always better to position yourself as a guide, a caring educator, an inspiring mentor. That’s the kind of (and only) business we're in.
Our kids did not ask to be brought into this world. The decision was entirely ours to make. Our kids don’t owe us anything. We owe them everything.
You can be two things at once. Despite having two wonderful boys and a loving partner, Dr Becky Kennedy realised that her client was portraying feelings of frustration, self-blame, and resentment. She felt that she had to discipline her children at the expense of having any fun with them. “I wish I could be silly,” the mother said, “but someone has to enforce rules and make things happen.” Here’s the BIG idea: You can yell and be a loving parent. You can mess up and repair. You can regret the things you said and do better. You can be strict and firm and unwavering, yet funny and silly and vulnerable. “We don’t have to choose between two supposedly oppositional realities,” Dr Kennedy writes in her brilliant book about practical parenting, Good Inside, “We don’t have to choose a single truth.” We can be two things at once.
Stay open forever. “There are really places in your heart that you don’t know exist,” Anne Lamott wrote in Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, “until you love a child." All those heart-warming smiles, all those baby talk, all those emotional connections you feel towards your own kids and others?They’re not coincidental. Parenthood forces you to interact with the world in an active way. It opens you up. Now this is the rest of the story: Stay open forever.
They’re not meant to see the big picture. Another solid piece from Dr Becky Kennedy: Most of our frustrations with our kids are because we see a bigger picture than they do, and that we're working towards goals they can't understand. So part of being a wise parent is learning to accept that our kids have limited access to the big picture. They find the rhythms and patterns within the ordered whole that we seek to provide—what to eat, what to wear, where to go. That's our job. We prepare the way for them. The important part is, for kids, growing up in a big-pictured world is about learning to grow small, and the effectiveness of doing so is dependent the sturdy relationship of trust with our children. If you’re good and wise and kind, then your kids—who cannot see the end from the beginning—have nothing to fear because they’ve placed their trust in you to see the bigger picture.
It's a rude awakening. The psychologist Jordan Peterson once pointed out that it's very hard for a person to mature until someone else in their life matters more than they do. This whole parenting thing is demanding to the core. Believe it or not, it isn't because of the emotions and fatigue that comes with it. It's because after years of functioning as a teenager to a young adult and now a parent, someone else FINALLY matters more than you do. It's a rude awakening. It's no longer about what you want or how you feel. The outcome is sacrificial, and you feel it in your bones. This is the outset of maturity. It's painful, but that’s how we grow. Stick with it. Stick till the end.
Conquer the will of children early. Susanna Wesley, mother of revivalist Charles Wesley, has this philosophy of parenting: “I insist of conquering the will of children betimes [early in life], because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education, without which both precept and example will be ineffectual.” Under her private tutelage, the Wesley children studied history, literature, classical languages, music, and, most importantly, Scripture. They memorised Psalms, Proverbs, and long passages from the New Testament. Susanna’s training created the stability and purposefulness in her children that made them diligent in religion and humble enough to be always open to the truth. Each child was subjected to the same intense regimen of study and dedication. Discipline was not overlooked; they were taught formal, courteous behavior of all kinds, and obedience was consistently demanded. This may seem harsh in the modern day, but it’s embodies an important truth that transcends every generation and culture: teach them from young. Whatever you deem important, whatever values, morals and behaviour you want them to embody for the rest of their lives, don't wait any longer. Do it now.
Time is also spelled as L-O-V-E. Before the author Ryan Holiday became a father, a fellow writer gave him some advice. “Work, family, scene,” he said, “pick two.” Actor Matthew McConaughey also said it interestingly: “I was making B’s in five things. I want to make A’s in three things.” Those three things are his family, his foundation, his acting career. Mathieu and I have chosen the word ACCELERATION for 2024, but with the limited time we already have, our effectiveness to carry out this mission—as entrepreneurs, as lovers of our family—can only be as good as what we choose to focus on. Ask yourself this question constantly: What are the things you can say hell yes! to with every hell no!? And no—you can't have it all. What you give your most valuable resource to is what you love, and that says everything.
The results of your parenting is not seen in your own children. It shows when your children have their own children.
Pray that life would be hard for them. When my son turned two, Mathieu and I wrote him a letter that outlined ten things we hope he could live by. Here’s one of it: I hope you will be, at one point, poor. I hope you will, at one point, lose something you treasure dearly. As much as we want your life to be smooth-sailing, it’s only through the power of scarcity that you will grasp the true value of what you have. The lack of clarity, money or pleasure will always be humanity’s biggest fear, simply because we fear what we do not have or understand. You are not exempted from it. But never allow this to hinder you from pursuing new experiences, take risk or trust people. I don't wish for suffering to befall my children, but we both recognised that if we want our kids to grow up into the strong, resilient, gritty human we desire them to be, we're not doing them the favour if we're constantly standing behind them to break their fall.
What use are you eventually? Your purpose as a parent, as pointed out by Joseph Wells, is to help your kids develop agency, and then make yourself obsolete.
They’ve been there all along. In her book How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell writes about what happens when people first begin to watch birds. They will, after trying to hear and see birds, become more aware of all the sounds around them. And eventually, they realise, holy cow! Bird song is an omnipresent symphony! “Of course, it had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realised that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time.” The same is true for your kids. Once you slow down and stop focusing on behaviour correction, once you stop trying so hard to instil change and focus on the human in front of you, your sensitivity for their love grows. Your kids have always been there been there. Their kindness have always been there. Pay attention—they’re everywhere!
They're not a mirror of us. Whenever I talk to parents about what skills (sports, instruments, art forms) they want their kids to pick up, I often get this impression that the choices are based on what can fill the gap in themselves rather than what’s best for their kids. It’s like we've been given a second chance at achieving what we could not in the form of our kids achieving it for us. I get it—it’s nice to see our children enjoy what we're passionate about. But here’s the thing: Our kids are not a mirror of us. They don’t have to do what we do. They don’t have to like what we like. Even Mathieu caught himself instructing Max to pick up rugby when he’s older (Max said he prefers football). But that's not a good enough reason for them to do what we want them to do because they’re born into the same family with inclinations towards certain activities. We have to ask them if this is what they WANT—and that matters way more than what we want.
Everything begins in your own circuitry. If you cannot remember anything, just remember this: Working on ourselves is most critical. Dr Becky Kennedy says that our ability to talk with our kids about important, vulnerable hard truths is dependent on our ability to tolerate the emotions that come up for us during these moments. Which is, again, another reason why working on ourselves is more critical than any single parenting intervention. That is the basis of being parent-leaders. And that is also the premise of why I invest so much time in this newsletter: Our parenting is dependent on our willingness to confront our own truths. The more we get to know our own circuitry, the more we learn to tolerate and explore our own tension, the more present we can be for our children. How often do you reflect on your actions? How aware are you of your own blind spots? Ask yourself this constantly, and you'll discover the foundational truth of what it means to be a leader in your family.
