Setting Long Term Goals for Your Child

Because the practical demands of parenting often dwarf the bigger picture, it can be useful to keep a parenting journal that ties practice to goal, stimulating an awareness of how your parenting style and behavior impact your child's long-term development. As you record your own personal responses to the questions raised in this article and others, you'll eventually find that you've written your own book on parenting.

Question:
What are your long-term objectives for the child? What skills and/or values do you want to emphasize and what does that look like in practice?

Context:
Some people believe that it is restrictive and controlling to impose long-term goals upon children, arguing that these sorts of things are better left to the child when he or she reaches a particular level of maturity. While I do agree that children ought to be given agency and choice in their own development, I can't help but point out that, in its most extreme form, this sentiment reflects a certain naïve or limited understanding of child development.

Aren't we setting goals, for example, when we encourage a child to read, to make friends, to use the toilet or make model airplanes? Obviously, there are certain values implicit in these activities; that a child demonstrate academic and social proficiency, observe certain norms of hygiene and refine motor abilities to a particular skill level. My point here is mindfulness--that parents hold themselves responsible for and acknowledge the goals they set--explicitly or not--for their children.

I'm more or less a relativist when it comes to other people's children, meaning, I don't necessarily believe that there is one correct or particularly great way to raise a child. There are all sorts of interesting and perfectly valid ways to bring a child up--until, of course, it comes to my own two-year old daughter, Solveig. Here I get kind of picky.

For example, it's important to me that Solveig be creative and have an ability to solve both every day and unique problems with some measure of confidence and independence. For whatever reason, it's important to me that she not become a person that says, "It's too hard. I can't do it." Somehow that relates to a particular lifestyle that I'm envisioning for her, one that curtails excessive dependence upon others and facilitates flexibility in daily life.

What that means to me as a parent is that I continually point out problems to her (ranging from finding the car keys to fixing the toilet) and model how these kinds of problems can be resolved. Sometimes I let her try to figure it out on her own, other times we work on it together, and sometimes she just watches. I try not to intervene unnecessarily, but am careful that she gets enough support or scaffolding in understanding how to solve the problem. I try to avoid as much as possible the impulse to get things done more quickly by saying, "Just let me do it." Patience pays off in the long run.

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