Expectations vs. Intentions: Part Two
In the first part of what I didn’t know at the time would become a series, I cited a conversation on the Friendship Bench, led by everyone’s friend, Phil “Don’t Call Me Hank” Williams, in which he asked a provocative question:
What are your expectations for going into a relationship and how will you approach it intentionally?
In a more recent conversation on the Bench, we were led by Nick Heap, a delightful gentleman and an estimable thinker. He, too, posed a provocative, figurative question:
What would you do to rule if you were appointed king of some land?
I call the question figurative because I don’t think Nick intended the question to pertain necessarily to a monarch or to something like a benign dictator. Rather, as I interpreted it, he meant someone more like a leader, or so I said during the conversation.
Oddly enough, I struggled again with what I take to be the juxtaposition of expectations against intentionality as I did in the conversation led by Phil. But more on that in a moment.
As Nick called on us one at a time to express our thoughts about his question, many of the people on the Bench talked about children because, as the saying goes, the children are our future. They were correctly idealistic in their comments, citing all the things all but the most disturbed among us would want for our children — to ensure they’re nurtured, loved, valued, heard, acknowledged, and protected, even as they’re allowed to fail, to learn from their failures, and to be neither judged nor defined by them.
As I listened, I wondered again: What if our intentions toward our children are the products of our expectations of them? And I also wondered, in consideration of Nick’s question, what should we do in the present to ensure the future and our children are what we want (expect) them to be?
Food for Thought
Within a day or two of that conversation on the Bench, I came across a post on Wired called, “Designer Babies Are Teenagers Now—and Some of Them Need Therapy Because of It”. This is the part most germane to the Bench conversation:
I worked at an adolescent treatment center. I kept coming across teens who were in distress about the way they had been created. Their parents had wanted a child who was musical or athletic or tall. So they found egg donors with the traits they wanted, created embryos with the husband’s sperm, and then implanted them … People who have children this way often place too much importance on genes while ignoring the environment. It’s like, “This is what our family is going to look like. We’re going to pick a kid, and this is how we’re going to put it together. Mom’s going to be in charge of the whole thing.” It’s like a project or building a company. People don’t always realize they are creating a human being and not a piece of furniture … Trying to control your child is a recipe for disaster. The kid is going to rebel. If you have a preconceived notion of how they’re going to be, either you’re going to be severely disappointed or you’re going to shove them into a mold and it’s not going to work.
That post reminded me of another one I’d read earlier, in The Cut, called, “The Rise of the Accidentally Permissive Parent”. This is the part of that post most germane to the Bench conversation:
The gentle-parenting movement has taken a valid idea — respecting our children’s emotions — and pushed it to the point where the power dynamic is flipped, and kids are running the show … “It’s as if there is a democratic approach to parenting. Parent and child are on the same level, and in some cases, the child is above the parent” … What is most exhausting for parents is thinking there’s an exact way to do things and a wrong way to do things and walking around with the pressure that you’re going to ruin your kids … we are killing ourselves to curate the perfect parenting philosophy, even though that doesn’t really exist … trying to raise children amid confusing messages, and it’s maybe not going so well … children are acting like rabid squirrels, which is annoying at a birthday party, but think of it this way: They have to live in the same house as said squirrels … Every parent deserves a little grace. It’s hard, thankless work to parent with proper love and limits. It’s equally hard to think you’re doing right by your kid only to get slapped in the face on a playdate.
What do those two posts have in common? They show that tangling unexamined expectations and intentions (even the best of them) often yields unintended consequences, even though those consequences would likely have been obvious with a little forethought and some increasingly uncommon common sense.
What, Then?
Does being fortunate enough to have survived into adulthood make us perfect? Hardly. But we’re the adults in the room, nevertheless. We have experience children haven’t had yet. And we have the responsibility to conduct ourselves accordingly.
In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults. (Thomas Stephen Szasz)
Do I believe we can learn much from children, including the lesson that we can get our senses of wonder, curiosity, imagination, and fearlessness back? Yes. But we’re still the adults in the room. The children in the room need us to act like it.
If we expect our children to be perfect — and raise them with the intention of making them so — we’re setting them and ourselves up for failure and all its corresponding pain and disappointment.
We can keep our idealism without losing our pragmatism.
Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/
