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Dear Bolu,
It's very often the wish of our parents that we surpass them and they don't hide it one bit. They bring it up passionately in prayer points on our birthdays, their birthdays, and any of our victorious moments. I think it is one of the purest expressions of love because there is no other person who'd say that to us. "I want you to be greater than me". Not siblings, spouses, friends, colleagues—you'd probably never hear those words from anyone else besides your parents. Please don't judge them because the odds are that you'd never say it to anyone else besides your kids. Of course, this doesn't mean that you don't love anyone else besides your kids. The words are just so heavy that it takes a lot to utter.
It might be a stream of thought on our minds but saying it is not easy. So I'm marvelled by the ease with which parents can say those words and mean it—without malice, hate and envy. Yes, they are our parents and they want the best for us but that doesn't explain it all. We want the best for our friends but we can't say those words. We can't. I'm not a preacher, but when Jesus said in the Holy Book; "Greater works than these shall ye do...", I believe he was expressing a similar sentiment and that is why I consider it one of the most genuine expressions of love. Ah, perhaps there are levels of expressions of love that we only unlock when we train the next generation. Perhaps.
Well?
When we think of doing better than our parents, our thoughts are mostly swayed towards achievements—essentially more comfort and increased stability. The only other area we might think of performing better than them is parenting. We might feel that they should have brought us up in a certain way—say with more license to explore extra-curricular activities, more exposure to technology, less physical disciplining, more heart-to-heart talks, and so on as the list ends where the galaxy ends. And we say to ourselves, "I'd make sure my child's upbringing involves these things that my parents missed out on". It's a very noble intention, one that I hope we transform into reality. However, these thoughts often come with a tendency and temptation to assume that we'd obviously and easily do a better job at parenting than our parents. We might, yes, but I'm not so sure we will.
Why do you think you'd do better than they did? You could say, for one, that you were a child at some point and now that you're much older, you can identify things that your parents could've done better. You could also say you know better; perhaps your parents had knowledge gaps which motivated some of the poor decisions they made but you're widely read with 167 books in your library, a Master's degree and an appetite for esoteric educative materials like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Good, good.
What we often choose to forget is that our parents were exactly like us. Young, perhaps also feeling their parents could've done better. They were probably more knowledgeable than their parents too because it would seem that the scope of man's knowledge expands with time. The only difference between us and them is the knowledge we have access to which is comparably more than what they had. However, that knowledge advantage does not necessarily equate to a wisdom advantage. Just because we know more than they did doesn't make us wiser than them. Were we in their shoes—growing up in their time and exposed to the conditions of life that they lived through—we might have turned out to be worse parents than them.
In other words, the difference in knowledge that exists across generations does not make one generation wiser than the other. That we know more than our parents is not sufficient armament to guarantee the safety and security of the opinion that we'd be better parents than they were. So I'm often baffled by how confident we are when we say we'd parent better than our predecessors. Do we honestly think the quality of parenting has improved in the last one hundred or so years? Just make an unbiased examination of society and everyone around you. Are you genuinely of the opinion that we'd win gold if parenting became an Olympic sport? I'm honestly not convinced.
I admit that my lack of conviction is not exactly founded on facts and numbers. I'm simply saying all this based on my observations. Nevertheless, I believe parenting gets tougher across generations and we generally become less equipped to be great parents for the simple reason that the number of variables that are involved in our lives keeps increasing. There's a lot more to worry about now than there was two decades ago and surely that can't make for easy parenting, can it? We only worried about bullies at school but now they're not just in school but also on social media. There are more intense, invasive, and inviting distractions today than there ever were. There are simply so many things to look out for and I'd argue that that makes bringing up a child today more difficult than it was in the past.
Say for instance you grew up in a household where you were not allowed to use a phone or a computer. Now you're grown and knowledgeable enough to know the benefits of encouraging a child's curiosity, so you boldly proclaim, "I'm going to allow my child have enough access to computers and mobile devices". Good, good, you deserve a freshly polished medal from Mount Olympus and I’d get it across to you if I had a flying chariot. But a new problem arises; how much access is enough access? And depending on your response, your kid might grow up thinking you made a terrible decision. You might turn out, based on that, to be a worse parent than your parents were. And that's why I don't think we should confidently say we'd parent and nurture our children better than our parents nurtured us simply because we know better than them. We may very well turn out worse just because of that newly acquired knowledge.
Parenting is a tough responsibility. Our parents did well with the knowledge they had and there's no telling that we'd have made better decisions if we were equipped with that same set of knowledge. There are more pitfalls today and we'd likely fall into one, two or a few more than our parents did. You'll likely have kids of your own someday—if you haven't had any already—and I'm pretty sure that you hope to be a great parent to them. I think that should be what we hope, pray, and aim for—to be great parents to our kids for the challenges we'd face are different from what our parents faced, dear friend.
Fin.
P.S:
I find it funny that it matters who says certain prayers. It's absolutely fine for your parent to say, "You will be more prosperous than me" and for you to say "Amen". However, it's not the same when the roles are reversed. You'll be frowned upon were you to say, while leading a prayer session with your parents, "I will be more prosperous than you". Yes, it might be their wish but something about it is not right and I can't place a finger on it. It'd be seen as an affront of some sort, but I'm not exactly sure why it's a bad thing to do. It's the same prayer point, expressing both parties' genuine wishes but it matters who says it. Well?
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Write you soon, merci !
- Wolemercy