Dear PiePie,
Should you choose to be a parent one day, I just want to pen down how I thought about this gnarly topic of raising a human (?!), which is as new to us as it will be to you, and how that might have evolved following our learnings from raising you.
And perhaps, depending on how our ‘methods’ may have impacted you, you might choose to adopt some or none of these.
I broadly think about a baby as a blank canvas, a ‘rasa tabula’, of which it is our duty to shape and ‘color’ to create the picture that is now a vibrant. How I went about doing it, is shaped by how I thought about traits and characteristics within human.
I imagine everyone as being a combination of an uncountable number of ‘dials’, almost like a DJ mixboard with the row of switches. Each dial represents a characteristic. This could things like propensity to share, with the extremes of not sharing (selfish) or very willing to share (can’t say no), or how in touch with emotions one is, from not at all to very fully.
Crucially, neither extreme is better or worse than the other. It just is.
As would be apparent, there can be any number of switches. I don’t try to define what these might be, except that everyone possess a unique combination of such ‘settings’, and that these ‘settings’ evolve over time as we have new experiences that affect specific switches.
One important note I want to make here is this: the good characteristics and the bad characteristics of a person comes from the same trait settings. One can’t praise that someone is thrifty while lamenting that they are not willing to buy gifts. The exact traits that may be a boon in certain situations could prove a bane in others, and is something we have to accept in totality.
Anyway, back to parenting. Within this framework, I hypothesize that the first few interactions the baby has with the world help to set the ‘initial’ settings for the dials – and I assume that one starts at the extreme until further experiences help to moderate and move the baby towards the centre, as the world has a knack of doing. So for example, if your first experiences of us as your parents are that we do as we say we will do, it is likely that you start off with more ‘trust’ of the world.
What this means is that sometimes, I try to think about how my action may affect your ‘dial’ settings and, combined with where I think you are positioned on that ‘dial’ and where I might want you to be, I would condition my reaction accordingly. Oftentimes, a reaction might affect multiple ‘dials’ and it then becomes a matter of prioritisation.
If this doesn’t make sense, ask me in person when you need to figure this out.
One trade-off, for example, is that you eat super slowly and don’t feed yourself even though you’re five. And if you feed by yourself, you often don’t eat a lot. But, although we try to encourage you to eat by yourself, I lean towards just feeding you if that makes you eat more. Because I believe everyone will eventually eat by themselves, but the nutrients that you’re not taking in now is ‘permanently lost’ as you can’t revisit this stage of development. This is prioritisation at play.
Being a parent is a million micro-reactions/decisions. We often aren’t even conscious of how we might be reacting to the child and what impact that may have, but when we are trying to actively shape your character, this is how I’m thinking.
I hope it’s worked out for you.
Love, Dad