We don’t want our children to be spoilt but we don’t want them to be deprived either. Where’s the balance?
We never know for sure. I am suspicious of those who claim that they know and are confident they’re doing the right thing as parents, as fathers. I’m never too sure, I’m not falling into the trap of clichés or habit or taking for granted my children. I try to be as much as possible a listening father and to judge my children through their own eyes, through their own souls, helping myself more often than not to memories, good and bad from my own childhood. I also get inspiration from books and history, from my own reflections on my relationship with my father as it evolved through time.
I look back with a critical eye and desperately want to repeat what was good but also want to avoid what was bad, but not bad as such, only wasteful, needless inconvenience. There was bad for sure, I judged it as bad at the time when I was a child or even a young adult. Now I’m not so sure, I changed my mind substantially on these judgements. Did I need more proof that judgements suffer from lack of stability? Yes I needed that proof and now I have it. These bad things from the past, they’ve gone like water under the bridge. I consider them now a nuisance, a passing glitch, a blip, a minor waste of energy. Luckily there weren’t too many. For sure I haven’t forgotten the bad things but whoever says that they negatively affect us I believe is lying. Oh, not just maybe lying, but is also ignorant and lazy and so accepting the much too trumpeted opinion of the do-gooders and the perpetually concerned of this world. Those that have nothing better to do than manifest themselves militantly self-righteous about the welfare of all and of children in particular. Hypocrites that in fact do all that from an unconscious drive for gratification and a false concern. I’m glad not to be in that camp and to denounce it.
I worked as a child. I worked in the fields, tended to farm animals, horses, cows, pigs, turkeys, ducks, geese, chickens, pigeons. I worked with my brother and sisters and with my parents and grandparents together. It was hard at times and I didn’t like it at the time. I felt forced to do it. In fact I resented it at the time. The feeling of that resentment came out of envy of other children not having to do all that and going to the river instead or playing. Let’s not get it wrong too much here, I had a lot of time to play and to go to the river as well but it felt like it was never enough. It’s never enough of a good thing even now, let alone then.
Looking back to that resentment I felt then, I won’t want my children to feel it. But I’d like them to want to help out when there’s a bit of work around the house. They did and they do because they want to, not because I force then. I think children should be persuaded not forced. They have to do things out of the respect you’ve earned and because they admire you as a man. Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, it should be a qualified admiration, not an absolute one. That would be alienating and even detrimental. I should be grateful that I’m not perfect and therefore never running the risk of having my children admiring me absolutely. So they’re safe on that one.