More than ever, parents need support and guidance to raise healthy children. But we can only expect caregivers to be as nurturing as they themselves are nurtured.

Our telecommunications world is too often impersonal, overly complex, and destructive of quality family time. As we head into the next millennium, we’ll need greater wisdom and courage to enrich our relationships as passionately as we enrich our technical awareness.

Actually, all of us are involved with children in one way or another and we too require encouragement and direction to be the best we can be for our children. Children are everybody’s responsibility. We all owe it to ourselves to face the many challenges of caring for our children.

From my years of listening to my clients, I can truly say that the following are the essential challenges of parenting which all of us may imperfectly strive for:

1. Accepting the responsibility of being in charge of your children.

Authority is a bitter pill for many of us to swallow. Who likes to be disliked? But children and teens need their parents to play authoritative roles—rulemaker, policeman, teacher, disciplinarian, clairvoyant, and occasional dictator—throughout their growing up years, without hurting their children. Parents who cannot be authoritative without hurting their children need to get help. Caring authority may not be popular but it guarantees that children have safe and sacred childhoods.

2. Allowing your children to direct you on their life paths

Without our interference, children need room to control many aspects of their developing selves and to make choices. They need to determine what clothes to wear, what foods they like, what friends they will have, and what careers they will choose. Often, their decisions are different than what we would choose for them.

Our children are like shooting stars—if we follow them in the heavens, they will sparkle. If we make them follow us, they will lose their glitter and be fallen stars. Parenting is a lot like star-gazing.

And remember, adversity is not the enemy.

3. Resisting doing for children what they can do for themselves.

In a less certain and unsafe world many of us nurturers are tempted to overprotect our children. However, none of us can guarantee complete safety for our children. The best protection our children can have is the competency to protect themselves—something we can teach them by not babying our children. And remember, adversity is not the enemy. Into any life a little rain must fall and a little rain with a lot of sunshine leads to growth.

4. Remembering your marriage and individual life.

Far too many of us guilt-ridden and overworked parents sacrifice ourselves for our children. We don’t consider our own needs when children make requests of us. Thus, our children become oblivious to the needs of others, develop unrealistic expectations of others, and become selfish. No one benefits. Healthy family life is a delicate balancing act of all relationships, especially those with ourselves. Let’s keep things in balance.

5. Resisting the over-organization of your children’s lives.

Let’s not forget the whimsical joys and memorable learning of children playing with other children without their parents being involved. The pressure and workaholism of organized team sports pales in comparison to the sheer fun of pick-up games, hide-and-seek, and other childhood activity. We need to respect the immense creativity of children. With safety and inspiration in mind, it’s best if parents can oversee and not interfere in children’s play, even when our children ask us to.

6. Practicing and expecting civility, respect, and compassion in family life.

Learning to say, “please” and “thank you,” addressing authority figures with proper titles, and practicing manners in daily life are not quaint curiosities but are ways of continuously honoring all the relationships we have. Incivility may be hip but it robs all of us of an awareness of how we impact others. In an overpopulated and intrusive world, knowing how we impact others will be a survival skill of prime and powerful importance.

We cannot work out our pasts on our children.

7. Making family time together central to family well-being.

Too many of us believe that our children need us less when they devalue us. Just the opposite is true—we are so powerfully important to our children that they fear losing us in this fast-paced world. They resort to substitutes. So, while allowing some room for negotiation, take your places at the family dinner table, go to church together as a family, and don’t let the world interfere with family love. There are no substitutes for the real thing.

8. Resisting the temptation to be your children’s friend.

The relationship between parents and children can never be equal. When children are asked to listen to or are exposed to adult problems, they become overly responsible for them and they put their lives on hold. Children need their parents to be parents and not friends. While caregivers may invaribly show their feelings around their children, they need to seek the support of other adults for their confidences, even when their children ask to be a friend. When parents become friends to their children, children lose their parents.

9. Resisting the compulsion to give your children what you never got as a child.

Going to the opposite extreme of how you were raised is often worse than how you were treated. We cannot work out our pasts on our children. We need to do that apart from our children. Perhaps we can use the lessons from our past to choose a path of moderation, incorporating both the good and the bad from our life experiences. Our children cannot learn our lessons for us.

10. Modeling non-violent and effective conflict resolution skills.

In our polarized world, children need instruction on how to live with differences between people—to live and let live. Parents need to demonstrate assertive expressions of anger, practice empathic communication, and demonstrate letting go of things they cannot change in family dealings. Perhaps the parents themselves need some mentoring on these skills.

11. Adoring your children for more than their accomplishments.

Cheering the deeds of your children may trap them into believing they are lovable only when they do well. Our performance-obsessed world will eat children alive if they are not loved warts and all. Begin by loving yourself warts and all. Paradoxically, I have never seen children perform more exceptionally than when their parents are blasé about their children’s accomplishments and deliriously happy with whatever they do.

12. Teaching right from wrong and sharing a spiritual tradition.

All of us deserve to feel healthy shame, and suffer certain consequences when we break certain rules. These rules need to be made clear and apply to everybody. Also, children will eventually develop a natural curiosity about God and we need to be prepared for the spiritual seeking of our children. It’s best if we ourselves have first done our own spiritual seeking and do not assume our children will pursue our spiritual path.

13. Forgiving yourself for how your children turn out.

Many parents blame themselves for their children’s lives. Mothers are especially targeted for blame. But children do not always learn the lessons we taught them on our time schedule, and there are many more profound influences on our children than just ourselves. Parents are responsible only for their efforts, not the outcome of their efforts.

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