How Parents Must Raise A Generation That Will Save Us

Parenting has gone from something natural to something that has become a job with many specific rules, fears and requirements. In fact it’s both more than than and less than sum total of all those rules.

It should be a partnership with our kids, a kind of collaboration that makes both parent and child stronger. That a large part of the approach of Dr. Ross Greene lays out in Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child. It’s an approach that will be critical as we rely more on future generations to rescue us from our current folly.

My conversation with Dr. Ross Greene:

Parents should be Gardeners and not Carpenters

For those of us that are parents, or grandparents, we are told over and over that parenting is the most important job we will ever have.

The assumption is that if we buy Baby Einstein, enroll our kids in the best preschool, (sometimes costing as much as college) provide just the right mix of extracurricular activity and teachers and pour in the right measure of self esteem, we will turn out, as if from a factory, the perfect child. One ready to take on the challenges and leadership of their world and one that will continue to be a part of the parenting/industrial complex

But is any of this true? What do children, with all their curiosity, really need? Do they need to be moulded, sculpted, or do they simply need room to grown and with lots of love as the fertilizer?

These are the questions that Alison Gopnik has been asking for years and now she bring all of this together in her newest work The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.

My conversation with Alison Gopnik:

What's the matter with kids today?

The two most important influences in the lives of children are, without a doubt, parents and peers. Which is more powerful, which has more influence?  I've recently had a series of conversations about both approaches.

On Monday I spoke to Allison Pugh, professor at the University of Virgina, about the influence of peers on why kids buy stuff, why they want the wii or Nintendo, or Nike, even if they don't watch TV.

On Tuesday I spoke with Richard Weissbourd at Harvard's Kennedy School, about the power of parents and why baby boomer parents seem to be to quick to substitute self esteem and their own agenda for their kids, for moral clarity.  

Together these two conversations a powerful look at our kids today.