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The Kitchen Round Table

a thought piece from Parent.org

What the hell is a "good" parent?

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Or put another way...

What is a good business person, or a good sports person for that matter?  Is it someone like Melissa Moon who can run up hill and down dale for hours on end, or is it an Anton Oliver who has the interesting ability to carry a oddly shaped ball and a couple of other large but non-compliant gentlemen several metres - perhaps it is a Beatrice Faumuina whose really good at throwing things or a Russell Coutts who is a handy helmsman. 
In attempting to nail down what "good" proponents of any art do, any definition can be somewhat elusive.  Oddly enough, despite this we manage to talk about success and quality in the sports, business and arts sectors without ever defining what it means.

Is this a problem?

Is the unwillingness to define a "good" parent one of the roots of the broad political focus on parental failure rather than success?  Do politicians shy from talking about good parents for fear being asked to define a good parent and thus be nailed to the nearest post by everyone who doesn't agree with their definition?  It would be a real tragedy if the whole mess that is our parenting environment arose in large part  because the ones who should be setting vision and leadership around parenting shied away from this crucial social duty and focused on failure simply because it is easier and safer for them to do so.

So, a good parent is....?

Like a sports person, business person, artist, politician or any other vocation success in parenting defies tight definition but rather can be seen as having some overriding attitudes and above all - dedication.  A good parent cares about the children in their care, and engages with them a lot.  They are ambitious for themselves to be good parents and ambitious for their children to do well, socially, academically, and physically, and to be emotionally strong.  The product of their work can be seen to be happy and healthy and doing well.  Isn't that enough?

What good parents might or might not be

A good parent may or may not have ever read a book on parenting, or attended a parenting course.  A good parent may or may not smack their children when they think it is required - heck, if we excluded the politically incorrect smackers we would have to think up some really screwy theory to account for most of the successful people in our society because clearly it can't have been the parental influence.  A good parent may be a solo parent, in a nuclear family or a whanau or some other arrangement.  A good parent may be biological, or step or adopted, or a relative.  A good parent may be completely rigid in their parenting style or completely flexible.  A good parent may be Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or any of a myriad of other religions.  Differences in parenting are simply that - differences.  They are not definitions of quality or barriers to success, and should not be seen as such, and the thing that is truly wonderful about parents is that even if they are good or even fantastic, they can always get better.  While there are physical limits to how great an athlete may become there is always new information for parents to learn, new practices to consider, and always opportunities for them to help their children grow into amazing men and women. 

So where does this leave us?

It leaves us, if we are brave enough, in exactly the same place as we are with other vocations - where we can talk about quality in terms of results and attitudes and not processes and practices.  Good parents raise happy, well balanced children.  That is something we should talk about a lot and spend a lot of time and energy encouraging parents to be ambitious for.  Currently we talk about parental failure a lot and, not surprisingly, parental failure is on the rise.  Why should anyone be ambitious for success in an environment when success is not valued?  In the same way that a sports person or business person who gets praise, acknowledgement and acclaim strives to do better, so too does a parent - but praise and acknowledgement is a rare thing for them.

Bottom line

Parenting is too important to our future economic and social success for it to be treated as something to be ignored unless it crashes.  It's well past time to stop talking exclusively about bad parents and start to talk about good parents, whatever they may be.

The Kitchen Round Table will come to you every few weeks, building on this idea of creating a better country by creating a better environment for our parents to operate in, so if you want some fresh thinking about social and economic issues look out for your next KRT.

Parent.org is a national lobby group promoting this common sense approach to building a better society.  We are a-political, non religious, non-prescriptive.  We simply believe that by creating an environment the encourages successful parenting New Zealand will become a better place for everyone.

Next edition – "I have a dream - or is it a vision"?

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