Pushing your kids (for their own good)

Being a parent often entails a lot of decisions about how much you should guide your children as opposed to letting the choose their path. This applies both to life-changing and everyday situations, from picking a new school to what to have for breakfast. If you let them choose all the time, they will be the authors of their life, but it might contain a disproportionate amount of suffering, some of which would also be unnecessary. On the other hand, bossing them around will rob them of any agency, they will not understand the rationale for decision-making and might even come back at you for making the wrong call on their behalf.

Photo: canovu

This weekend we are going out of town to visit some friends, and that has already caused some grievances in the boys, because they were "never consulted" and they just do not want to go. They claim that they have better things to do than spending four hours in the car on a Friday evening and the same amount on Sunday on the way back. Of course, leaving the kids behind for 48 hours is (still) out of the question, so we told them that they have to come to terms with the plan: it is not that often that we get to visit friends and we were not going to let this occasion go by.

These friends used to live in our town until four years ago, when he got an offer at another University and they moved. For four years we have promised to visit them in their new home and visit their new city... without much success. Then a few weeks ago they paid us a visit to say that they were soon moving back, so decided that we have to finally pay them the visit that we had promised and dove into our calendars to check for suitable dates.

Now the time has come and we have spent the whole week trying to negotiate with our kids just to make them come willingly. I am pretty sure that, once we come back, they will be ready to admit that the trip was fun, because I have prepared a visit to a museum of optical illusions and another one about cars and their history, so they are both topics that they can definitely enjoy. Let us see how it turns out. Enjoy the weekend!