It is an established principle of parenthood that one of your chief functions is to teach your children – although it’s never quite clear what you should put on the curriculum. However, I have learned more from my children than they have ever learned from me:
You have less power than you think.
The amount of influence you have on children – or anyone else – is limited. Children, supposedly the most malleable individuals we come into close contact with, are nevertheless fully their own people. Children are not just small adults, but creatures with a whole range of distinct belief systems – and many of these are not susceptible to reason, argument or anything else. They are extraordinarily impressionable, it is true – but, crucially, not in the ways you think or expect.
Selfishness, laziness and egotism can be beautiful.
No, I’m not talking about fathers. I don’t know how they get away with it, but children are highly inclined towards all of the above and yet remain wondrous, charming and irresistible. It’s a trick some try to carry on into adult life. This tends not to work out well.
Rationality and justice do not rule.
Children are inclined to make the deluded assumption that there is a just solution to any dispute – and that their parents will duly impose it. Parents often start off parenthood believing the same thing. However, it turns out that the way blame and punishment is apportioned for any particular alleged misdemeanour is as often as not determined by, at best, limited facts and the boundaries of adult reason; at worst by mendacity and low cunning, usually on the part of a sibling. Any given act is always unfair to someone. Parents discover that, like governments, they have to make do with order rather than justice.
You are not as important as you thought you were.
This often comes as a particular shock to fathers (mothers work it out the moment they get pregnant or long before). Fatherhood is largely an exercise in attaining humility in the face of brute circumstance. Until they have children, a lot of men entertain the conceit, consciously or not, that the world revolves around them. After children arrive, they realise they have just made way for something much more important than themselves – the next generation, which, at birth, is beginning the urgent project of edging their parents out of the way.Mothers tend to take this for granted. Fathers need to have to have it spelled out – repeatedly, and in some cases, indefinitely.
Time moves faster than you thought.
Once it passed at a stately pace marked by the odd wrinkle. Now you see it in constant rapid motion as you witness the unending transformations of your children. Children teach you about ephemerality. And therefore mortality.
Loving and liking are largely unrelated.
If you haven’t learned this already from your partner, your children are here to clarify it for you.
Loving is better than being loved.
You always thought you wanted someone to love you. Then you discover that the big payoff for being a parent is not so much to be a target of someone else’s love but to have a repository for your own. To be loved is desirable. To be able to love, it turns out, is indispensable.
The world is more complicated than you thought.
Once upon a time, you thought someone, somewhere knew most of the answers even if you didn’t. But subject to the simple, relentless questioning of a child, you soon realise that the world mostly comprises unanswerable questions. How can you tell when sour cream goes bad? What colour is a mirror? If a person is born deaf, what language do they think in?
It’s not that these questions didn’t exist before. It’s just that you didn’t have to think about them. Now you know how little you know. And, as Socrates’ son or daughter doubtless patiently explained to him, that is the beginning of wisdom.
