Loving Your Children For Who They Are
The things that make me different are the things that make me me.
- Piglet
Most of us know that as parents, we should love our children for who they are, not who we want them to be. But, like many things we know to be true, this can be hard to live out. All of us have biased hopes and expectations for others, and the closer they are to us, the more we love them, the stronger those can be. As some of our children are growing past childhood and differentiating into the adults they will become, I’m faced with accepting the increasingly obvious ways in which they differ from me. And this is something I find easier to do when it comes to differences in interests than in temperaments or values.
For example, we have no expectation that any of our kids go into medicine, though both of us are doctors. I can celebrate their athleticism, though (or perhaps because) I am no athlete myself. They don’t have to do what I do, like what I like, or follow the path I did to get where I am. What is harder for me to accept are differences in disposition and values—to accept a child who likes to linger and move slowly, when I am efficient and concise. Or someone who doesn’t know how they feel or what they want, when I’m prone to quick assessments and decisions. Or someone who prioritizes relationships more than I might. Or someone who feels they must stick to and worry about every rule when I’m fine with cutting corners if the situation calls for it.
What this is all showing me is that what I take for granted to be best or right or the obvious thing to do are not really those things at all. They are merely the result of my own dispositions and values, which are not necessarily better than other dispositions and values. Efficiency is not always better than lingering. Taking action is not always better than needing time to process what you feel or want. Being motivated by tasks is not always better than being motivated by relationships. Efficiency, decisiveness and so on are values. They are not absolute truths. They have strengths and weaknesses, just like other values have strengths and weaknesses. One is not better than the other.
Why is it that these dispositions and values have become so deeply engrained in me that I tend to think they are the best or right way to live? Perhaps because in my profession or path in life, I have been rewarded for living that way. Perhaps because I have been able to cull my friends and peers to avoid those that differ too widely from my own preferences for functioning. If someone doesn’t make decisions according to a similar timeline or matrix, I don’t have to work with them. If they don’t value the same ways of communicating, I don’t have to keep engaging with them. But we don’t get to choose our children. We can’t control every aspect of who they turn out to be. And we shouldn’t.
It makes me sad to think that I may give my children the impression that my disposition or values are better than theirs, as I probably have. To consider that in my struggle to understand, or accept, or relate with who they are and how they see and navigate the world, I may be sending the message, verbally or not, that there is something worse about how they function. I need and want to truly believe that the ways they are different from me are not only something to be worked through and tolerated, but something to be deeply valued and celebrated.
This is not something I’m going to be able to sit down and (efficiently) decide to do. It’s going to happen the way any truth in our head makes its way down into our hearts, into the place where it starts to change our perspectives and desires and actions—through many iterations, some big and some small. Through prayer and counsel. And through practice: trying, and messing up, and trying again. In the end, parenting is like marriage: you learn as much about yourself as you do about this other person you love. You see things about yourself you might never have questioned before. You yourself need to change as much as they are. And that’s not always a bad thing.
