A note on Parenting

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Summary

To raise a child well, immediate practical actions are only one part of parenting. The most critical part focuses on deeper impacts – things that will impact the type of adult the child becomes. In addition, the first three years of a child’s life are the most critical, so these things need to be a focus from the child’s earliest days.

There are six foundational traits every child needs to develop in their earliest years to help them become good adults;

  1. Emotional security
  2. Emotional self-confidence and self-management
  3. Internal locus of control
  4. Delayed gratification
  5. Resilience
  6. Age-appropriate thinking skills

For parents, developing these traits in our children is hard. But the pay-off is unambiguously enormous. Children with these traits are far more likely to grow into happy, health and successful adults.

It’s not easy to raise kids who will become happy, healthy, successful adults. But if you have children, then you owe it to them to do the hard work to raise them well.

Being a parent is hard. Being a good parent is incredibly hard. Being a bad parent is comparatively easy. You always have the easy parenting option –  If your measures of success as a parent are incredibly low. Otherwise, it’s important to include the six traits above in the things you focus on when trying to develop your children.

References

The items below have been used as references in the broader piece … which remains under construction.

Recommended Books

We’ve found these books to be very useful in understanding the criticality of early child development, and what’s critical in that development.

Other Source Material

The papers, books and articles listed below provide further information on the topics raised above. They haven’t been directly referenced in this edition of this article, but they’ve been useful in building the understanding to create this article.

Some Extra Notes

  • If you’d like to compare your parenting in relation to education support to parents in other countries, the Varkey Foundation has done a very interesting study on the topic. See: the “Global Parenting Survey” (2017), https://www.varkeyfoundation.org/what-we-do/research/global-parents-survey/.
  • Stanford Marshmallow Experiment;
    • The most famous, and most revealing, experiment of delayed gratification is the Stanford Marshmallow experiment. This experiment tested how long children could avoid giving in to temptation, and used that to predict lifetime outcomes – with a high degree of success. Although the details of the experiment have been more recently drawn into question, the criticality of delayed gratification at an early age remains solid.

Keep in mind that this test was done on five-year-old children. It tests the tacit skills a child has learnt in their earliest years, because that’s when the real impact happens. Keep in mind, also, that the test is not 100% predictive, and other factors can affect a person’s levels of delayed gratification.

Being a parent is hard. Being a good parent is incredibly hard. Being a bad parent is comparatively easy.

If a parent doesn’t want to put the effort in, and their measure of success for their parenting is that their child doesn’t spend too long in prison when they grow up, then they don’t need to worry about any of this. They can just say it was all genetics and the school’s fault, and they, as the parent, can abdicate all responsibility for their child’s personality and life path.

For those willing to put intellectual effort into raising their children well, the information contained here provides a guide for some important things to aim for. It provides a starting point for working out how to develop a well-rounded child who becomes a happy and successful adult.

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