Raise the Child You Have

As parents, we often carry an image of how our child should be.

You may wish the cautious child were more adventurous, the intense child were calmer, the quiet child spoke up more, or the social child needed less attention.

You can find yourself responding to the gap between the child you have and the child you imagined, rather than to the individual child in front of you.

But our children come to us with their own temperaments, preferences, strengths, and sensitivities. Our job is to help them grow, not to fit them into a mold.¹

The tricky part is distinguishing between the expectations and boundaries rooted in your values and those rooted in your preferences about who your child should be.

Does it matter that your child is quiet, or do you simply wish they were more outgoing?

Does your child need to become more competitive, or do you need to let go of your dream of raising an athlete?

Are you holding an expectation because it reflects something important to your family, or because you want your child to do things the way you would?

Parenting requires us to hold a tricky balance: setting boundaries and expectations rooted in our values, while leaving space for our children to grow into who they are.

So the question to consider this week is:

Where might you need to hold an expectation, and where might you need to make more room for the child in front of you?

¹ Psychologists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess introduced the concept of goodness of fit: the idea that a child’s development is shaped not only by their temperament, but by how well their environment and the expectations placed on them fit their individual characteristics.