As a mom to four children, I leave learned over the years that no matter how “fair” we are with our children, how similarly we raise them and set expectations for them, or how much we push them, they are all beautifully, uniquely, and curiously different.
Their preferences, the mannerisms, the dreams, their strengths, and their weaknesses are all specific to their individual selves despite growing up under the same roof.
It is one of the unspoken wonders of parenting, really, that we can be so fully invested is so much at once.
Alas, often our children teach us as much about ourselves as parents as we teach them in their youth.
The openness and acceptance that our up-and-coming generation yearns for is in its own way inspiring.
They have a reputation among older generations as “entitled” at times, and even occasionally naïve.
Perhaps one of the faults in our generation of parents is that we want our children to be a reflection of the image that we often mistook for “success”- in a time of rapidly accelerating technology, we evolved from “keeping up with the Joneses” to “keeping up with the Jetsons.”
In doing so, we placed these magnificent little devices into the hands of our sons and daughters and quite literally gave them the world at their fingertips with little to no instruction on how to navigate it, treat it, or even discern between what is safe and what is not.
With the access to such convenience, it’s no wonder that delayed gratification has become such a thing of the past.
Even fast food has become faster- you can now download an app to have your food paid and ready before you arrive (if you’re so ambitious that you would drive to get it yourself).
It’s not all bad, though — really!
We’ve desperately needed these conveniences to accommodate the expectations that we as a society put on ourselves.
What were once considered “traditional” values are now considered “radical.”
We move faster and faster with time, and before we know it, the kids have grown up and we’re wondering how and why they think the way they do, and why this generation is so vastly different from those of the past.
We sometimes forget that we aren’t raising our children alone anymore. What once took a village is oftentimes now at the mercy of the entire internet.
In closing, and I say this with the utmost respect as an always-learning parent (and as someone who dreams of the days that we can teleport and travel through time to keep up): investing time is substantially more valuable than investing money when it comes to our children.
They owe us nothing but giving them the world without giving them the best parts of ourselves is robbing them of much of the beauty that it is to be human.
Rachel Lyon
Mansfield, Ohio