Raising children

Winnicott’s crucial insight was that the parents’ agony was coming from a particular place: excessive hope. Their despair was a consequence of a cruel and counterproductive perfectionism. To help them reduce this, Winnicott developed a charming phrase: ‘the good enough parent’. No child, he insisted, needs an ideal parent. They just need an OK,

When you ask people about their life’s meaning and purpose, parents say that their lives have more meaning than those of nonparents. A study by the social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that the more time people spent taking care of children, the more meaningful they said their life was—even though they reported that their

Most parents love their children, and it would seem terrible to admit that you would be better off if someone you loved didn’t exist. More than that, you genuinely prefer a world with your kids in it. This can put parents in the interesting predicament of desiring a state that doesn’t make them as happy as the alternative.

Wir sind so oft nicht wirklich präsent, weil wir andere Dinge im Kopf haben. Wenn unsere Kinder uns eine Frage stellen und wir gar nicht so richtig zuhören, da sagen wir vielleicht, war ja nicht so wichtig. Aber wenn das immer wieder geschieht, verpassen wir plötzlich einige der wichtigsten Momente im Leben unserer Kinder und damit auch unseres

It is a sign of the supreme wisdom of small children that they have no shame or compunction about bursting into tears. They have a more accurate and less pride-filled sense of their place in the world than a typical adult: They know that they are only extremely small beings in a hostile and unpredictable realm, that they can’t control much of what

Denn wenn unsere Kinder ein allzu perfektes Bild von uns Eltern vorgelebt bekommen, so argumentiert die Elternberaterin, desto mehr können sie dazu neigen, sich selbst unter Druck zu setzen. Jetzt und später in ihrem Leben. "Je mehr Eltern sich dagegen verletzlich zeigen", sagt sie, "je häufiger sie sagen: ‚Ich kann nicht mehr‘ oder ‚Mir ist was

Sometimes when you listen closely to your body, the message you hear is a call not for food, but for fasting. You may observe this in animals, which abstain from food when sick, and in young children, who sometimes go days eating hardly anything at all (much to the consternation of their parents!).

The attachment we have to an individual can supersede an overall decrease in our quality of life, and so the love we usually have toward our children means that our choice to bring them into existence has value above and beyond whatever effect they have on our happiness.

The one thing parents can do for their children is live their lives as fully as they can, for this will open the children’s imagination, grant permission to them to have their own journey, and open the doors of possibility for them. Wherever we are stuck, they will have a tendency to be stuck also or will spend their life trying to overcompensate.