Kira Roerig, a Family Therapist at Anasazi Foundation, talks about the “paradox of parenting” and how parents can best help their children.
Transcript of The Paradox of Parenting:
When a child is really struggling, parents often wonder: ‘Am I good enough? Am I doing enough as a parent?’ And I think, one of the great paradoxes of parenting is that your influence as a parent matters so much and yet, at the same time, no matter what you do—even if you are the perfect parent—you may or may not be able to—your child may not change in a way that you’re hoping, or at least in the timing that you’re hoping. And often the journey is a lot longer than we hope to see some of those changes come.
It’s a little bit like a seed. We talk at Anasazi a lot about Seeds of Greatness. We feel like our role is to try to find the Seeds of Greatness in young people and help nurture those and similarly, parents are trying to provide the adequate sunlight and the proper soil, and water for their child. And yet, even if they do all of that to create the perfect nurturing environment, there’s nothing they can do to force that seed to grow.
And it can be tempting even to dig up the seed and check on it. But nothing, nothing that we do can force that seed to grow. That’s still that child’s journey.
And so, one of the things that we invite in parents is to be on their own journey, to create that nurturing environment, and to do their best at that. And yet, to know that that journey is still their child’s.
