Close your eyes and think back to the day your child was born. Remember the moment your eyes locked with one another and the feeling of holding one of God’s greatest gifts for the first time. Did you imagine looking in the innocent eyes of your child and envisioning the rest of their lives: Montessori preschooling, soccer and dance lessons, all A’s from Kindergarten to 12th grade, piano lessons, fluent in French or Mandarin, having nice friends from nice families that look just like our family, attend our college Alma Mater or at the very least an Ivy League School, no screw-ups in college, and then off to graduate school to be mommy or daddy’s next protégé.
Now open your eyes and fast forward to today and ask yourself, “Am I struggling with the fact my child hasn’t received all A’s since first grade and he’s now a C student in 9th grade?” “Or my rising senior just told me she wants to take a gap year and find herself?” “Or my 5-year-old refuses to play the sport I love and cries at every match he plays in.” Then your vision and expectations could very well sabotage your relationship with your child.
Parental Expectations vs. Child’s Needs
We as parents struggle the most when we become stuck in the mental utopia of visions and expectations of our children that have no room or space for imperfection. And oftentimes, this struggle is compounded when we define our children by who they are versus who we want them to be. We suffer the greatest as parents when we pursue a life for our children that doesn’t belong to them. When expectations are not met, pain ensues, and we often place blame on our children who did not live up to our expectations – even if our expectations are unreasonable. Most often, expectations come from what we’re used to, our family growing up, or our own personalities.
We’re taught to imitate something and want something, that we project onto our children, that doesn’t belong to us or our children, which ultimately causes suffering. If you grew up in a family in which everyone went to college and graduate school to pursue a career in law, most often you will expect, at the very minimum, for your child to go to college. But what happens when he says he does not want to pursue higher education, but culinary school to become a chef? Or what happens when your adolescent chooses to quit the math and science clubs and pursue creative arts? The inability to release those expectations creates not only a barrier between the parent/child relationship that blocks effective communication but is harmful to a child’s sense of self.
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