Moonshadows

Hyper-Parenting: What Really Matters?

June 22nd, 2006

And now, for the final installment!

Chapter Nine of Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard? by Alvin Rosenfeld, MD, and Nicole Wise is called “What Really Matters?”

This was the chapter that clinched it for me. I really appreciated what the authors wrote in thiis conclusion and have started to spend more time thinking, pondering and pursuing interests that do not involve my children. I still do spend time learning about and with my children, of course! I’m not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.

What are the big questions in life? Are we so busy doing that we forget to consider them? “It seems possible, even reasonable, today to live a full life without ever facing an existential question bigger than ‘What’s really better, buying or leasing a Ford Explorer?’” Oh my goodness, did that make me cringe. I know at times I’ve felt that it was so much easier to websurf than to sit down and really think. I’m going to make this my goal. Even writing this blog, where I work to put together thoughts into a somewhat coherent essay has been a challenge. I read what others write and become discouraged that I am not as literate or eloquent as I want to be, but I hope that with practice, my thinking and writing will become clearer.

I will finish off with some quotes from this last chapter:

Life’s big questions “are important because, even without conscious thought on our part, the answers to them define what our lives are about, and direct the decisions we make every single day.”

“Staying busy makes it easy for us to evade introspection.”

“We each must find a purpose to our life, a reason for being on this earth, a mission that transcends both the good and bad days, that sustains us in the verdant spring times of our lives as well as in the bleak, dark winters.”

“To become independent and successful parents, to give our children the real tools they need to go through life well, to teach them to think for themselves, we have to think for ourselves, to decide what life means for us.”

Entry Filed under: Parenting