06/04/2023
ข้อคิดสำหรับพ่อแม่ทุกคน จาก The School of Life สถาบันเพื่อความเข้าใจชีวิตในประเทศอังกฤษที่ก่อตั้งโดยปราชญ์ Alain de Botton
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PROSPECTIVE PARENTS
It’s often said that no one can ever really say what a good parent is, let alone draw up a checklist for a prospective one. We politely disagree:
1. It’s fundamentally about love, properly understood: a willingness to put one’s whole life aside for fifteen years at least in order to enter imaginatively into someone else’s boundlessly delicate and perplexing experience. It’s about an unfamiliar word: sacrifice.
2. Soften whatever you need to say, moderate your anger, attenuate your frustrations. Edit yourself. You are meant to be playing a role. This is a very small and very fragile being you’ll have on your hands. They’ll notice everything you do and are. And will, at the start (when it really counts) blame themselves for every error you make.
3. Get on top of your issues for the requisite hours of duty. Your neuroses will no longer be a charming indulgence. The person you’ll put on the earth will be around for some 90 years and how you perform in the first 10 will be everything. No one is forcing you to do this. You’re volunteering on the implicit basis that you have the necessary skills. Your audience will not be impressed if you don’t and has no need to be forgiving.
4. Let yourself be ‘boring.’ No one wants an exciting parent. Just a reliable and humane one. Try not to go mad. Allow them to be the crazy centre of attention for as long as it takes.
5. Don’t use your 35 year head start to intimidate. Appreciate all the temptations - and quash them one by one.
6. Don’t hold it against them that they might have a nicer life than you: Allow them to be more intelligent, successful and happy than you have ever been; that’s a prize, not a humiliation.
7. Make sure your sexuality is resolved. Do not take them into your loneliness or employ them as a crutch. The rest doesn’t even need to be said.
8. Try to get on with your partner - and when you no longer can (few do) hate them very politely.
9. Understand that bad behaviour will always be a symptom of something missing; try to find out what it is.
10. Don’t require that they always be ‘good’: prefer that they be real, with all the dramas that will entail.
12. Allow yourself to be hated sometimes. Be prepared to be the bad guy in the name of directing them to what they need, not what they want.
13. Prepare to fail substantially - and to accept failure with a thorough lack of defensiveness. Offer them a map to their likely neuroses early on. Pay for their first therapist.
14. There’s in fact only one rule in the end, not fourteen: Love Them Properly.
