The Best We Could: A Parenting Manual for Our Kids

In this episode of The Best We Could – a Parenting Manual for Our Kids, we are speaking directing to our children. It is a message to our kids regarding guiding principles.

On today’s episode I am going to be talking about who I am. I have been hesitant to share much about myself because I don’t want to give you, the listener’s, a bias. Although, we are human and we want to connect. Many people have expressed interest in knowing who I am. I do think it’s important that you know a little bit more about me.

For starters, I started this podcast so my kids would have a manual. They will know how they were parented and know what their default setting. I didn’t have that. Because I didn’t have that, I had to spend a lot of time figuring it out.

[00:00:27] – Our simple guiding principles

[00:01:17] – Voluntary relationships, your parents are the only relationship you didn’t choose.

[00:02:37] – We want you to be well socialized

[00:06:07] – The difference in compliance and commitment

[00:07:37] – Discussing acceptable behaviors preemptively

[00:12:11] – Building commitment

[00:15:43] – Focusing on alignment with the big picture

[00:17:20] – Universals: What’s good for you is good for me

Quotes from the Episode:

* “Our goal in raising you up, is to make it so that other adults are going to find you

enjoyable to be around.” [00:02:22]

* “It is better to negotiate those things prior to being in the situation.” [00:08:29]

* “Compliance is valuable, especially in the short term and especially for, novel

situations. But relying on compliance is like only eating candy bars because while it will

get the job done in the moment, there are longterm consequences of relying only on

compliance.” [00:10:05]

* “It’s possible to go through life avoiding getting in trouble, so to speak, but never

actually accomplishing anything because your focus has been you, your compass has

been pointed to compliance rather than commitment.” [00:14:16]

 

Episode Transcript

I want you to understand that your mother and I thought long and hard about this we have, obviously we want you to be successful in life. We want you to be happy in life. But before all of that, we as parents decided. That we needed to have some very simple principles that we could focus on that comes before any of that stuff about where do you potentially want to go to school? What do you want to be in life? What do you want to become in order to get to that? That’s later on in the game. We have a couple of inputs that we filtered all of our interactions with you through. There are a couple of reasons for this. Number one, since our relationship with you is the only non voluntary relationship that you will have in your life, we ask ourself as parents, how will this action or a decision that we make stand to impact our relationship, our parent-child relationship with you both now at the point of making a decision and also into the future.

So think about this for a second. All of the other relationships in your life will be voluntary. All of your friends, you can choose to be friends with them or not to be friends with them.  Your coworkers, you can choose to leave and get another job, but your parents are the only relationship in life that you didn’t choose.

We kind of chose you. You didn’t choose us. So our goal is to make it so that if you did have a choice, let’s say in a hypothetical world, kids. That you had the choice to choose any parent that you would choose us at any point throughout your development and even into your adulthood. And that’s kind of challenging because as you know, sometimes you get frustrated.

Sometimes we get frustrated, but we’re coming at this from a set of principles that we think we&#...

So how do you introduce the first episode of a podcast series? Well, this podcast is unique in that it’s designed to help children, specifically my children understand how they were brought up and how they were parented. This may benefit you as a parent and an adult as well, but basically this is the conversation that I’m having with my children.

And the reason that I’m having this is about a year ago, I went off to work and I came home. And I was in the hospital for several days after that because of something that happened at work and it really made me realize that all of the effort that I had put into raising up my children. they would not have the benefit of understanding why I had done those things.

The only relationship in a child’s life that is not voluntary is that between the child and their parents, we strive to raise children who, if given the hypothetical choice to choose any one in the world as a parent. Would pick us as parents, both as children and, later as adults. Some key characteristics that we aspire to in order to achieve this goal are being adaptable, meaning that we are focused on the outcome and not necessarily on the method of getting to that outcome.

Summary and Quotes

[00:00:01] – Introduction of the first episode of the Parenting Manual podcast

[00:02:25] – Critical actions in parenting

– Learning

– Interacting

– Modeling

[00:05:02] – It’s ok to be wrong. Explain what happened, that involves people as opposed to isolating people.

[00:09:38] – Objectives: We strive to live by the phrase we did the best we could with the knowledge we had.

[00:15:15] – Questioning our parents about their parenting style

[00:18:34] – The distinction between parenting omissions and parenting commissions

“The only relationship in a child’s life that is not voluntary is that between the child and their parents, we strive to raise children who, if given the hypothetical choice to choose

anyone in the world as a parent. Would pick us as parents, both as children and, later as adults.” [00:00:52]

“We’re not going to blindly bend to peer pressure simply because that’s the easiest thing to do.” [00:01:52]

“When there is disconnection and frustration between parents and children, ultimately everybody suffers at that point.” [00:05:54]

“Compliance is something that can be good or bad because it can keep you out of trouble, but it can also make you passive.” [00:16:20]

Transcript Below

As parents, we are understanding. We have a willingness to look at the situation from different directions in order to understand what might be motivating. Our kids’ behavior, and we’re also resolute, which means that we’re not going to be unduly influenced or pressured by others in our family or in our community or in our society who might be intimidated by a more purposeful style of parenting.

Basically. We’re not going to blindly bend to peer pressure simply because that’s the easiest thing to do. Each characteristic has a number of actions that can be associated with it. The nice thing about actions is that they’re much easier to measure then characteristics. So let’s look at an example of three, three really critical actions in order to be a parent whose kid would choose you as a parent over any other parent in the world, both as a toddler and as an adult, are.

Number one, learning, which means as a parent, I acquire knowledge on parenting, on relationships, on culture, and even on other disciplines that may not be related to parenting, but will help me make better decisions for my children and for our family. A measure of this, or a good example of this I changed my behavior.

Based on the knowledge that I acquire. We’re not just acquiring knowledge for the sake o...