Which is the more difficult, bringing up children or bringing up parents? The former may be more important but the latter is a continuous process too. There is enough advice (often confusing and contradictory) for young parents, but not nearly enough for young adults.
Parents are being constantly told they don’t know how to bring up children. Not by psychologists or childless couples, but by their own children. This social phenomenon is hardly researched. There are no papers presented in our universities nor is there a line from Socrates or Plato that everyone quotes on the subject.
I think it was Jackie Kennedy who said that if you bungle raising your children, whatever you accomplish in life does not amount to much. But what if you bungle raising your parents?
While everything else has got more professional, more data-driven, parenthood remains the preserve of the amateur. Perhaps by our third or fourth child, we begin to get the hang of it, but usually by then it is too late and we tend to lose interest. The first child gets everything in concentrated form: the good, the bad, the unexplained.
When my son was growing up I’d tell friends proudly: “He doesn’t need much. Just fresh air and the occasional watering.” But when he became an adult, he complained of his childhood air and watering methods and lectured us on how children should be brought up.
In a moment of honesty, I realised I had done the same to my father. His response was the one that parents everywhere have been telling their children throughout civilisation. “Wait till you have a child of your own, and then you will understand.” I did and I did. At least enough to pass on that pearl of wisdom to my child, who will, at the appropriate moment of irritation and frustration, repeat it to his child. It is, to quote Elton John, the circle of life.
And it is not a father-son legacy either. My wife tells me that her mother told her something similar. Perhaps that is how we keep our race alive. Each succeeding generation begets children to know if their parents were right. They also believe they can break the circle and become the perfect parents.
But of course, there is no such thing as a perfect parent. Psychologists speak of the Perfect Parent Syndrome, where the attempt to become one ruins lives all around. I haven’t heard of the Perfect Child Syndrome, but it must exist and could be equally ruinous. The perfect parent-perfect child combination will bring civilisation to an end. After such perfection, what evolution?
Parents begin by doing to their children what they wish their parents had done to them, and keep at it for a while before giving it up because their children will always tell them they know best.
Oscar Wilde got it right when he said, “Our children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
