Have you ever wondered how we prioritize things for our kids? Do we just prioritize the most important things by default as parents? Yes food, safety, health but what about after that? How do we determine what to prioritize?
The logical answer seems to be - the most important of course. But what is the “most important?” How do we determine what is actually “most important?” You would wish it was just universal and clear cut, but it’s not.
You can probably just look at those around you and see that everyone prioritizes things differently. Sometimes it’s even hard for us to understand why something is or isn’t important to others.
So let’s go back to the question we started with - how do people determine their priorities for their kids beyond the necessities?
It’s complex.
What we prioritize is influenced by the people we are surrounded by, what we watch or read, what we grew up seeing around us, our insecurities, our own upbringing, our parents expectations, peer pressure, unfulfilled dreams.
Your head hurting yet? Yep, mine is too. It’s hard to unpack and decipher all of that. You might be wondering, why does it matter?
Can you imagine working on a project for 18 years and then realizing that you weren’t working on the right things? That would be painful and heartbreaking. Seems like the right thing to do would be to take a moment to figure out what the goals are, what is truly important and why before starting on the project.
The “why” helps us drill down to the things that are actually important with reasons to back it.
This is why there are well-known parenting experts with unpopular opinions around why parents must do the work with their kids. We have to work on ourselves in order to get clarity on what is important. We have to work on ourselves in order to make sure we aren’t just blindly doing things that we label important because our parents and their parents and their parents did it that way.
After all, what is the point if we don’t raise a generation that is at a minimum, slightly better than us.
The only way to be truly confident about what we are focusing on and prioritizing for our kids is if it comes from deep within us - a pure, genuine place without any external attachments.
When it comes from a pure, genuine place of knowing then it doesn’t matter if the neighbors kids or all our friend’s kids are doing one thing - we are confident and sure of our approach because it wasn’t just something we unknowingly ran with. It was well thought out, it was intentional, it was purposeful. When it comes from a place like that then nothing external can make us feel doubt or insecure about our decisions. And when we take a moment to figure out what truly should be important then we don’t feel regret 18 years down the line.
What are the few important things that you are prioritizing as a parent and why?
Neha Patel
Co-Founder, Hatch Brighter