the Parenting Project

Today the first contributor post went up on a parenting project I'm involved with (http://cairnparenting.org). I wanted to write some explanation on this project. First of all, Chad and I have spent about a year wondering how to best extract some wisdom from other parents out there who we'd like to have question and answer sessions with. We've thrown around the idea of inviting ourselves over for an interview but have never done it. Some questions we want answered are about things like how they did allowances with their kids and taught them about money, how they did college and mission financing (kids or parents or a combination?), etc. I was thinking about this again a couple months ago and the idea of creating a blog asking parents these kinds of things just kind of came together for me in my head. During that initial week of thinking about how to make this kind of thing work, I was thinking one day about the importance of helping us parents be more effective teachers of our kids so that more people have a good chance of being ready for the Second Coming. As I thought about that I got such a strong witness from the Spirit that what I was doing was a really good thing. It was a stronger witness than I've gotten about something in a long, long time. Kinda made me wonder if I got that strong of a witness because the project was going to end up being really challenging. :) I always tend to get so excited about an idea and just run in without really thinking of how difficult it will be to accomplish. For me that's a good thing because it gets me started before I get discouraged, and then it usually works out in the end, just after a lot more work than I anticipated.

Anyway, the biggest challenge for this project has been in determining how to select contributors and how to not make that an awkward, judgmental selection process. We don't tend to normally judge parental success on anything, and probably for good reason. There are likely so many factors that go into the overall end of the parenting effort and it isn't really fair to parents. Either way, we had to develop straightforward criteria for who would be selected to contribute and why. We decided that there are four stepping stones to adulthood we would like our kids to do, but these are things they have to do on their own and things they have to be properly prepared for in order to succeed. The four things are: testimony and a commitment to it, marriage, finishing college, and a mission (not necessarily required but would be really good). Finding families whose kids meet a high percentage of this criteria has been tough. I think of everyone I know, 2% knew someone whose family meets this with 80% or more of their kids.

The awkwardness of selecting families has been hard, and I've gotten some feedback about how horrible it is to try to statistically select contributors and how sensitive a thing this is. I agree 100%. I've worried about this every day for over a month. But here is my rebuttal: feeling like you failed in any way as a parent has got to be an awful thing to feel, and so yes, it is a very sensitive thing to try to select contributing parents based on what their kids have done. But saying that we should never try to define what is effective and teach my generation how to do better because we don't want to hurt feelings isn't doing anyone any favors. That's just setting my generation up for more failure than is necessary and then later trying to gloss over it by saying it didn't matter and was probably all up to the kids anyway ("some spirits are just harder and who knows?" is something I've heard that doesn't sit quite right with me). I think the more Christlike thing to do is to do what's in our power to teach parents, to provide parents like me with more information to help us better help our kids no matter what kind of "spirits" we got. We must do this.

There are many people I admire who aren't contributing, not because I wouldn't love to hear their opinions (I plan to ask some of them many of the questions anyway myself), but because 80% of their kids haven't finished college. That kind of criteria doesn't mean that they weren't good parents or that their adult kids aren't successful. It's just something that is important to me, and I want to learn about how some families got all those kids to finish college.

I hope this will turn out to be a very positive thing. Either way, despite the challenge I know it's something I'm supposed to pursue and even just two questions in I've learned some helpful things that are better defining who I want to be as a parent.