My husband and I struggled with when exactly to become parents. Years went by and it never felt like quite right. We were young, living away from our families in London, and renting a small basement flat. We wanted to be settled – in our careers, in a city, living in a place we owned – before we committed to having a child. After all, those seemed like the sort of things parents, actual proper adults, should have.
In hindsight, we needn’t have worried as much as we did. Our daughter, and then our sons, were born to two parents who deeply care about them and their wellbeing. Like many parents, we put aside much of our own needs and wants to give our children the best life we could. More than a decade after becoming those shellshocked new parents, we now take more assured steps on our parenting journey. Our children are happy and healthy and thriving.
But of course, like all parents, we worry about whether what we give them is enough. Would it be better if we could afford to send them to private school (even though the notion of private schooling is against both our beliefs)? Should our children be doing more after-school activities? Have we saved enough to give them a financial head-start when they become adults?
Worrying about the future, it seems, goes hand in hand with parenting. We worry not just about the sort of people our children will grow up to be, but also whether we have equipped them enough to live happy fulfilling lives. We worry about what sort of world we will be leaving our children and many of these worries feature in our children’s lives too.
But ultimately, where does worrying get us? It’s not going to change the future. I started meditating around the time I was to become a mother for the first time and one of the lessons I’ve learned is that I can’t control what’s going to happen down the track, but I can control how I feel about my present. I can control – to some degree at least – what happens in the now. And just as I can’t change the future for my children by worrying about it, I can at least change their present by giving them the best childhood I can.
In her book The Philosophical Baby, Alison Gopnik writes about how as parents and caregivers we determine a hugely important aspect of our children’s lives and that’s the childhood we give them. She talks about a project in Michigan where children from deprived backgrounds were given access to dedicated caregivers. The benefits of this were seen 20 to 30 years later when those children had grown up to become “more prosperous, better educated, healthier and less likely to go to jail”.
Similarly, Michael Delman in his book Your Kid’s Gonna be Okay writes: “For our children, our patience, kindness and encouragement will pay better dividends than constantly wringing our hands and telling them how anxious we are about them.”
All this means that perhaps one of the most important things we can do for our children is to worry less about their future and focus more on their present. As much as we can, we have the power to give our children a childhood that will carry them in good stead for the rest of their lives.
In western countries we spend so much of our lives worrying about our children’s future, perhaps to their detriment, as Gopnik has argued in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter. Rather than worrying about their future, perhaps we should be more concerned about what will one day be their past – after all, unlike their future, our children’s past is one thing over which we have some semblance of control.
This is not to say that as parents we won’t mess up or that life won’t throw events our way that we can’t control. It also doesn’t mean that we should ignore the foundational needs of our children and not do what we can to set them up for success. But perhaps the worrying and fretting over whether we are doing enough is not as important?
The good news is that if you are thinking such things, you’re most likely already an excellent caregiver and have your children’s needs as a priority. Perhaps what’s most important is that we are there for our children, and that no matter how much time in a day we have for them, we try to make sure it is quality time without distractions.
• Saman Shad is a writer based in Sydney
