Are you a good Parent?

Are you a good parent? The answer of this question would give your son or daughter when he or she becomes a parent himself or herself.

Recently, I was reading a post written by business consultant Peter Bragman.

He was on an old, rustic train at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida when he noticed a majestic lion sitting on a rock on top of a hill, in perfect view.

“Aren’t we lucky the lion is out,” He mused to the “ranger” on the train with him.

“He’s always out there, sitting on that rock,” The Ranger responded.

“Really?” Peter said. “How do you get him to stay in that exact spot?”

The ranger smiled and answered “ The rock on top of which the lion is sitting royally, for all the park visitors to see is temperature controlled. It is warm on cold days,  and cool on hot days. No need to train the lion or tie him to the rock or hope he likes the view. They just make the rock a place the lion wants to sit.”

This triggered a bell in my head. Our parents played a similar role in our life. Just like that theme park, our parents made our study room the place we wanted to be in. Like a role model, our parents, proactively took care of all our day-to-day needs so that we only had to focus on our studies and overall development. Our parents also set reasonable and age-appropriate expectations with us. They empowered us to excel in each area whether studies, sports, engaging in social environment, and helped us reach our maximum potential. Rather than focusing on discipline, our parents created the right environment to get the results we needed to become competitive and successful.

It’s no secret that children can be cold or absolutely unresponsive to change, especially if the change comes from an external force. After all, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” In the case of parenting, we often see this adage put into practice when parents hire an external tutor to scrutinize their children’s way of learning, identify the problems and propose new ideas.

Leveraging an outside point of view is often a logical approach because children are too young to prefect their learning pattern; they tend to stuck in their own habits and can’t see the forest for the trees. However, this outside-in approach often leads to resentment among the children, resulting in increasing lack of cooperation and inevitably rendering new changes null and void.

This may sound like an odd analogy, but “save the children” an international organization that provides aid to impoverished children faced a problem in 1990 when it opened an office in Vietnam. Resentful of having a foreign entity on its soil, the Vietnamese ministry gave “Save the Children” representatives Jerry and Monique Sternin only six months to solve the problem of malnutrition among millions of children. Faced with a virtually impossible task, the Sternins decided to try something no one else had before: they asked the Vietnamese people themselves how to solve the problem.

The Sternins enlisted the help of the mothers at a local village to identify children who were bigger and healthier than average and discover what the families of these children were doing differently. Working together, they found that the parents of the healthy children were serving smaller meals more frequently and using different ingredients that had more proteins and vitamins. The Sternins and the village mothers used this knowledge to collaboratively design a program to combat malnutrition that, six months later, improved the health of 65% of that village’s children. The program eventually spread to other villages, and overall it helped more than 2 million Vietnamese children overcome the malnutrition problem.

So why were the Sternins so successful? Because they searched for the bright spots and cloned them. The mere existence of healthy children provided a ray of hope to the village mothers. The mothers then provided the momentum necessary to change their village’s cooking and eating habits. The Sternin’s role as ‘outside expert’ was to simply ensure that these women were able to conquer malnutrition on their own.

Why this analogy is so relevant and powerful. Our parents searched for bright spots in us ‘all the time’ and help us clone them. I remember I was very good in mathematics but not that good in many other subjects. Our parents worked with us, asked us ’how to solve a particular problem’ and took the benefit of inside-out approach.  Rather than focusing on what was wrong in our learning pattern, they focused more on what was right. The found what was working well in a particular area, and helped us duplicate the same pattern again and again. By cloning these small successes, our parents created a permanent change in our life right from our childhood.

I am so proud of my parents. Their efforts succeeded; I got admission in one of the best engineering college in India, got a good job, and happy a family. I have two loving daughters. Now the burning question is - Am I a good parent? The answer of this question would give my daughters when they become a parent themselves.