For most of us, our main experience with parenting comes from thinking about how we were parented by our own parents. There are some of you out there who really enjoyed your upbringing and might emulate that style, but for most of us we tend to want to do the exact opposite of how we were raised. Call it rebellion, call it fear of becoming your parents, call it self-reflection of your own inadequacies that were obviously the fault of your thoughtless parental units and all the mistakes they made because they are stupid mean poopy faces.

Our frame of reference of how to deal with our children is so intimately tied to how we were treated when young. It is virtually impossible to avoid the influence of your subjective experience and how you wished things were for you. If your parents we super controlling, you may want to give your kids more freedom. Or if your parents were very critical you may want to be excessively supportive. Where the intention behind this is rooted in a rationality that makes sense to you, it may not always be what is best for your particular child.

While you might have fantasized about having more independence and less micro managing, it might feel like neglect to your child. Or you may have felt you never got encouragement, but being too supportive of every potential interest your child has could manifest into enabling rather than motivating.

The irony is that the extreme opposite spectrum you may traverse in order to avoid being like your parents will end up making your kids want to be the opposite of you… so then they will be more like their grandparents! Instead of becoming your parents you can end up making them!

Although we will never escape our conditioning, we can control how we let if effect us. There are so many different ways to raise children that I think it is good to experiment and see what works best. My current approach is the classic “raised by a pack of wolves.”