Don’t be a Try Hard parent

There is almost unlimited downside to how much you can screw up a kid when you are entrusted with raising one. Like what if you run a nationwide experiment on what if you raise children without a caregiver figure Such responsibility is not to be taken lightly.

But control over the upside? Not as much. It’s not that your kid won’t have a wonderfully fulfilling life, well beyond what you yourself experienced. It’s that you have relatively little say over whether that happens. On the personal scale your kid has their own natural ability and innate personality. And on the societal scale they have to contend with social attitudes and macroeconomic trends.

Worse than having little control over the upside, is how often parents go to great effort thinking they are improving the upside, when in fact they are achieving the opposite. I don’t think I have to explain the concept of a helicopter parent.

I would venture to say that in the long view of human civilization, if you took all the adults considered to be successful members of society in their day, that most of them grew up with minimal parental involvement, judged by modern standards. Similarly from a societal standpoint, if most individuals in your society are more-or-less successful—and especially if that success goes back multiple generations—there is a tailwind contributing to your kid’s success. All of that is to say: chances are decent that your kid will turn out fine, even with only minimal involvement from you. Humans grow in response to challenges presented by their environment. Kids are no exception. To a degree, this is all self-correcting. Provided that you as a parent and society can protect kids from the destructive challenges.

Which is why I want you to start neglecting your kids.

j/k… Definitely do not do that.

If you are taking the time to read a blog post on parenting, chances are low you are the type of person who would criminally neglect their kid.

Beyond that, spending time with children can be personally rewarding. You get to experience naches. But even more selfishly—being around young people gives you the heady feeling of being young again.

Rather than spending time with your kid because you are trying to ensure their success, I think a more productive model is to do things with your kid that you both get something out of. Like you would spend time with a friend.

English is lacking here. A parent-child relationship is decidedly not a friendship. There is a required symmetry to being friends—both people have to bring effort to the relationship—otherwise you have some other type of relationship, not a friendship. Whereas parenting can be deeply asymmetrical. Plus, a parent has to be the gamemaster for their kid: making sure rules are obeyed, creating structure, setting up appropriate challenges, refereeing disputes.

But what I like about the word friendship is that it conveys two things:

1. You do things together you actually enjoy
2. You don’t have to pretend to be someone else

For me, I enjoy playing hide-and-seek and other simple games, and going out to museums and zoos. For you, it could be any number of other activities.

tl;dr spending time with your kid for their benefit is typically counter-productive; finding things you both enjoy doing is easier and you both get more out of it