Bring me up nice

Published on August 12, 2004 By oneofus In Home & Family

Seeing as how I'll soon become a parent, each day I have some thoughts about the way I should bring up my child (and no, we don't know which gender it wil be - yet). Should I try to impose only a few moral guidelines, leave it all to the school and society or try to transfer to it my complete view of the world and value system? Each of these solutions is doomed to failure, as I've seen the results of them on my friends. E.:
- if a parent tries to enforce his/her view he can create two things: a) a rebel that will spend most of his/her energy rebelling or

a subdued person without a will or indeed ability to create his/her own opinion about anything
- when this part of the upbringing is left to the instituions, friends and society, the child usually becomes too open to all sorts of influences and is in danger of a) becoming too obssessed with one idea - be it a religion, art, or hoby (my definition of a 'fanatic') - and thus miss becoming a complete person or

not focusing on anything long and hard enough to develop it's natural affinities and bring out the best in him/herself...
I could go on (I do go on sometimes, don't I?)

So, what to do? I guess I'll have to sort my own opinions and be careful about expressing them in front of the child - at least unit it's 17 or older, and probably it is best to let it try most of the things for him/herself. It's going to be a struggle, I can tell.

Anyway, all this brings me to a question - how is it that in a few thousand years that our civilization has been developing we still haven't found a system for creating the people out of our children. I mean, we have schools which impart knowledge, but every child is brought up in a different way, and although there are similarities inside of one nation, we still get killers, robbers, rapists and all the other examples of people clearly not being able to tell the diference between what is and what' isn't good for the society.
Some nations are better in this (we mostly like to call ourselves developed although it doesn't have to have anything with technological development) and some are quite plainly bad (incidentaly most of them have quite low living standard). But even those that are 'quite good', still have their jails full, their streets dirty and a lot of their people miserable under the hands of others. Somehow I think if we only rose our children right, most of the problems we face today could be solved in one generation.
But how do we do it? And are we, who were raised the way we were, capable of doing it at all?

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