The Purpose of a Parent
Late last year, I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Bear by Andrew Krivak. Both came highly recommended, but neither were particularly good.
The Road is about a father and son journeying through a post-apocalyptic world, avoiding cannibals and heading south to warmer winter weather. The Bear is about a father and daughter, also making a journey through a post-apocalyptic, albeit brighter, world.
Spoiler alert.
In both stories, the dads die, leaving the son in The Road and the daughter in The Bear to fend for themselves. And in both books, the kids were well prepared.
I didn’t love the stories, but they both shared an important message: the purpose of a parent is to raise confident, self-sufficient kids. Your job is to make yourself obsolete.
In another of my recent reads, I saw a line with a similar sentiment: From a biological perspective, the ultimate act of failure is to raise helpless kids.
Raising helpless kids is a failure from a societal perspective too. If parents don’t produce self-sufficient children, the children grow up to be a burden to society.
As my wife and I prepare for the imminent arrival of our first child, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to be a good parent. The Road and The Bear crystallized my thinking. Success means making myself unnecessary. Every component of good parenting points back to this goal.
So what does this mean practically? What will I teach my daughter?
Trust me, the irony of a parenting article written by a yet-to-be parent isn’t lost on me. I’m sure my views will evolve. But that’s why I write. To form my beliefs, remember what I believed, and appreciate how my beliefs change.
Here’s my prediction: my definition of a good parent will stay the same, but my methods will grow and adapt with experience.
Now that we’ve gotten those disclaimers out of the way, here’s what I’ll teach my daughter.
How to learn
This is the root of everything. Learning to learn is the first skill anyone needs to transform from helpless to capable.
By learning how to learn, you create your roadmap to travel from novice to expert in every area of life.
There are tons of layers here, but this is the basic layout:
Identify the new skill you need to learn.
Research the new skill through books, articles, podcasts, videos, and conversations.
Attempt the new skill.
Use that action to identify where you need to learn more.
Figure out the 80/20. What 20% of your effort will get you 80% of the way there. This is sufficient for almost everything you’ll need to do in life. As a quick example, if you need to learn a new language, find a list of the 500 most common words in the language. Make flashcards and memorize them.
Create a practice plan. Learning anything new requires consistency.
Find an expert to learn from.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’ll get you most of the way there.
How to communicate
Communicating clearly is a superpower.
Can you write emails that people understand? Can you translate your thoughts into a convincing argument? Can you look a stranger in the eye, shake his hand, and ask him for a job?
My father in law, Chris, owns a sporting goods store. One day a man came to the shop and tried arranging a job for his son.
“Hang on a second,” said Chris. “Send your son in here for an interview, and make sure he comes without you.”
Three years later, that kid is still working for Chris. I’m sure his communication skills have improved tremendously.
Parents too often want to speak for their kids, but that doesn’t help kids build the communication skills they need. Instead of doing it for them, I’ll coach my kids on what to say and send them on their way to say it themselves.
How to cook
Health and fitness has become a moving target in the age of processed foods and sedentary lifestyles. Cooking the majority of your meals is a cheat code for health.
Cooking is also a confidence builder. Knowing you can feed yourself in the absence of cafeterias and vending machines has a way of putting a person at ease.
In addition to cooking, kids should understand where food comes from and how to produce it. Planting a garden, raising animals, fishing, and hunting are all valuable skills. Knowing food is harvested by the hand of a human is better than thinking it appears in the aisles of a store.
Being the human hand that harvested the food is one step better.
Not everyone can live on a farm. But everyone can visit a farm or a farmers market. Everyone can walk in the woods and take trips to the river bank with a rod and reel.
My kids will know the origin of their food. They’ll harvest most of it. And they’ll learn how to cook all of it.
How to fight
Some of you will disagree, but hear me out.
The capacity for violence is much different than the propensity to commit it. Everyone should have the capacity for violence. It’s a deeply rooted evolutionary ability that kept humans alive forever.
The fact that most modern humans never need violence is beside the point.
Two things Jocko Willink said made him feel most like a man were training Brazilian jiu jitsu and going to war. What do those two things have in common? Proficiency with violence.
If you have the skills and the training to defend yourself in a violent situation, you’ll be a more confident human. And counterintuitively, you’ll be a more peaceful human. When you understand your capabilities, you don’t feel the need to constantly look for your limits. You already know what they are.
And in the off chance you need to use violence, you’ll be prepared. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
How to fix
Humans today are helpless. My children won’t be.
We live in a society where when something breaks, we buy a new one. Or we pay someone else to fix it.
In many cases, this is a good thing. It allows us to specialize—to focus our time in the areas where we excel while seeking the help of others in the areas they excel.
But we do this to a fault. We’ve become so specialized that we can’t do anything on our own.
When I was a teenager, my dad taught me to change the oil in my car. He taught me how to hang sheetrock and how to frame walls. My mom taught me to put patches on my pants and buttons on my shirts.
None of these are exceptional skills, but they are the foundation of a mindset. A mindset that I have control over my world, and I can fix or build more things than I might otherwise imagine.
Of course it’s useful to be able to fix things, but the confidence of being self-sufficient translates far beyond the application of the skills themselves.
How to fail
We should all aim to fail more than we succeed. The most successful people in the world have failed over and over and over again. But they are the outliers.
Society tells us to avoid failure. As we grow, we learn to fail less.
But this isn’t because we become more successful. It’s because we take fewer risks. We take less action. We avoid the things we don’t know how to do or have yet to master.
Pride is our Achilles heel.
I want to teach my kids to fail early and often.
It’s not that I want them to fail. I want them to know how to handle failure.
I want them to see failure as a point of feedback rather than a source of discouragement. I want them to see failure as a stepping stone on the path to success rather than the wall preventing their entry. I want them to see failure as a badge of honor rather than a scarlet letter.
Nobody wants to fail. Failure is embarrassing and frustrating while success is exciting and rewarding. We’d love to get everything right on the first try. But that’s not how the world works. Reality is painful.
We try things, and we fail. If we’re smart, we learn something from our failure, and we try again. And probably fail again. And learn some more. And try some more. And at some point, we succeed.
But if we never become comfortable with failure, we’ll never persist to success.
When Kobe Bryant was 11 years old, he played an entire season of summer league basketball without scoring a single point. Imagine if his failure kept him from coming back.
To be clear, failure isn’t the goal. Action is. And since failure is a byproduct of action, we need to normalize it.
When kids aren’t embarrassed by failure, they’ll take more action. And the more action they take, the more success they’ll achieve.
Go make yourself obsolete
You’re probably picking up on the theme by now. Confidence and self-sufficiency are the main traits I want to instill in my children.
Of course I want them to be kind, and polite, and caring, and on, and on. But those are the price of admission. They should go without saying.
Confidence and self-sufficiency are the aims. Making myself obsolete is the point.
This is where I intend to start.
Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash
