SAM'S CENTS
Your Kid, Your Clone?
Yesterday I ran into an old friend and he shared his frustration about how different his son is from him. What he was really saying was: “Why isn’t he more like me?!” He continued to tell me that his son is exceedingly smart but lacks the ambition that he has and he finished by saying that he has no idea how the kid will ever make it in this world. His son is eight years old.
My heart broke a little. Not for my friend, but for his son.
It isn’t that I don’t have empathy for my friend. I do. I have three children and they have three very distinct personalities. I understand that occasional feeling of “How can my kid be this way? I was never this way!” On some days I feel this more than others. In our pre-kid fantasies our mini clones would arrive and be charming, kind, cheerful, generous, brilliant and "perfect” in every way. But once you fall in love with the foreign being that appears at birth, you realize that what makes our kids so beautiful is how distinct they are.
Our children are their own people with their own personalities, preferences, strengths and weaknesses. And anyone who has kids will know that you are not responsible for all of their successes just as you will never be responsible for all of their failures. The best we can do is to make our kids feel good about who they are rather than to overwork at bridging the chasm between our expectations and their reality.
I suggested to my friend that his son might be wired differently: "Maybe he won’t be a banker but he will be a college professor or maybe at age 8 we really can’t predict who he will be at all." He responded by telling me that he understands his daughter really well because she is just like him. He already knows. She is three years old.
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