Anxious Parents (3) — The Parent-Child Relationship

Anxious Parents (3) — The Parent-Child Relationship

What is the right way to get along with children? Can being too strict harm a child’s self-esteem and personality development? Can being too permissive, through overindulgence, lead to bad habits? Finding the right balance in the parent-child relationship feels, at times, even more complicated than a central bank’s monetary policy. From that perspective, calling the central bank “the nation’s mom” seems oddly fitting. Whether it is quantitative easing or across-the-board tightening, the effects can often be seen immediately. But the effects of raising children and shaping the parent-child relationship usually have to be measured on the scale of an entire lifetime. That is exactly why parents should be even more thoughtful and cautious when discussing strategy. After all, policies can change overnight, but inconsistency on the part of parents can only harm the parent-child relationship.

In all kinds of parenting books, views on the parent-child relationship also tend to fall into two extremes. One side advocates attachment parenting, emphasizing companionship, understanding, and growing together with the child. The other focuses on rules, principles, refusing to compromise, and cultivating independence. I believe every theory has its own background and its own success stories. But in practice, we lean more toward closeness and companionship. This requires greater patience—sometimes enormous patience—and much more time, and it does carry the risk of slipping into overindulgence. Even so, we still believe that a close relationship has more positive meaning than scolding.

For those born in the 1980s, the transition from being children to becoming parents presents even greater challenges. Our own relationships with our parents in childhood may have been closer to the traditional Chinese model of a strict father and a loving mother. But that role division has been under intense pressure amid rapid social change. The absolute authority of patriarchy within the family has increasingly been replaced by more equal family relationships, while democratic and egalitarian Western family models have also become more visible. As a result, when dealing with our own children, we may waver between the roles we inherited from our families of origin and the equal relationships we hope to build, or we may simply lack consistency. This is something that must be continuously practiced and refined as our children grow. Children give us one—or perhaps two or three—chances to reexamine our own childhood. In Freud’s terms, we remain unable to escape the influence of childhood even after becoming adults. But becoming a parent may offer an opportunity to revise and reshape our own experience.

In the parent-child relationship, the most important thing is still meaningful companionship. Of course, the amount of time matters too, but compared with sheer time—for the person primarily responsible for caring for a child, time is basically a nonstop 24/7 commitment—the quality of that companionship also matters greatly. Mere physical presence combined with emotional indifference, or a situation where each person is absorbed in their own separate concerns, has no value for a child’s growth. For children who cannot care for themselves, that kind of companionship is only the most basic guarantee of survival. Not to mention the constant stream of news stories about children being put in danger, or even dying, because their guardians were too absorbed in their phones to properly look after them.

High-quality companionship includes early education, play, and other activities. If time allows, even simply being present during sleep has value. Children grow far faster than we imagine. The parent-child relationship is not only meaningful for children; it is deeply meaningful for parents as well. It ought to be something natural. But because industrialization has left most people with far less time to accompany children as they grow, perhaps the only thing we can do is to be more focused when we are with them, and to make that time more valuable. And there are two conditions for making companionship more focused and more valuable: first, sincere love that comes from the heart; second, the necessary knowledge to understand a child’s physical and emotional needs.