Getting Real about the Kind of Kids You Want to Raise
If I could make only one wish for a child, I’d wish him the quality of lovingness.
- Benjamin Spock
We didn’t devote all of our conversations on this Salish Lodge getaway to our traits as parents. In fact, over lunch on that first day, we got things rolling by talking about the traits we wanted our children to have.
“What kind of a man do you want John to be in twenty years?” I asked Les.
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he sat pensively, fiddling with his fork on the linen tablecloth while looking out the plate glass window to the Snoqualmie River Canyon below. “I want my son to be deeply secure in who he is—like those huge rocks down there,” he finally said. “I don’t want him to be a man without backbone, swayed by the current of any old thing that somebody wants him to do or think. I hope he’s strong and confident.”
“Wow,” I said, “you’ve given this some thought.”
“Not really,” Les confessed. “I just know I want to raise a kid who doesn’t cave in to peer pressure. What about you?”
“I want John to be the kind of man who is genuinely kind, you know? I hope we raise him to be sensitive to other people and really caring.”
Les grinned widely, then began to chuckle.
“What’s so funny?”
We both laughed about our stereotypical answers. But we kept talking. In fact, we talked for at least another hour about the traits we wanted our son to have as a result of growing up in our home. We discussed the fact that his own God-given personality would dictate much of who he will be—regardless of what we bring to his life. But we kept talking about who we might help him to become within that context. Eventually we came up with a list of traits describing the kind of person we hoped John, and any eventual siblings he might have, would grow up to be.
Here are some of the characteristics we wrote on a note card that afternoon:
Emotionally secure
Hopeful about his personal future
Relationally savvy and connected to others
Persistent in his goals and undertakings
Respectful and kind toward friends and strangers
Thoughtful and effective in his decision making
Deeply reverent toward God and grounded in his Word
These traits weren’t in any particular order, and our list wasn’t exhaustive. But it was enough to guide us toward the qualities we would need to embody if we wanted to raise this kind of child.
Making Our Own List of Personal Parenting Traits
By the time our personal parenting retreat came to an end, we had a good grasp on what we needed to do. Strike that. We had a good grasp on who we needed to become. In fact, the traits we noted during that retreat have shaped the traits that make up the basic outline of this book. But there’s more to parenting than our own influence.
Once we had formed a rough list of the personal traits we wanted to embody as parents—some of them, by the way, being more important to one or the other of us—we eventually shared it with an intimate group of friends who met us for this very purpose in Chicago. We hadn’t shared our list with anyone since we had made it at Salish Lodge nearly five years earlier. But after seeing how our own list had so positively impacted our personal parenting, we knew we wanted to share this exercise with other parents.
So, after connecting over a superb Italian dinner, we met our friends around a large conference table at a Chicago hotel and began talking about parenting. We put up three or four easels around the room with plenty of paper to write on. Some of our friends had newborns; others were seasoned parents.
“Okay,” Les started, “most of you are parents, and some of you hope to be parents someday. What we want to know is what kind of parents you want to be. When you think about the traits that you want your son or daughter to observe in you, what comes to mind?”
With that, we were off and running. Les was filling up the easel pages with one trait after another. The group members were energized by the exercise, wanting to expound on each trait they mentioned and why it was important to them as parents.
Our next step was to take the two dozen or so traits we’d listed and begin surveying other groups of parents to see which of these traits had the broadest relevance. Our goal was to whittle down the list to a manageable size by consolidating traits that overlapped and eliminating traits that appealed to only a small fraction of parents. And that’s just what we did.
In our next installment we’ll show you what we found.
Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott are the founders of RealRelationships.com and the authors of several best-selling books, including Your Time-Starved Marriage, Love Talk, and the award-winning Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts. This article is an excerpt from their new book, The Parent You Want to Be. Click here to order a copy…
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