Last week we were having dinner with a couple of good friends whom we haven’t seen in a while because of distance. As we sat around and chated while watching our kids play together after dinner, she turned to me and asked, “Alfred, you wrote that the past few years have totally transformed how you look at marriage and parenting. What’s the most important lesson that you learned when it comes to being a parent?”
As I thought about that, my mind automatically started replaying moments in my life spent with my parents or with Taylor that taught me what being a parent is about. It occured to me that parenting is done in “moments”. As it is with me and my parents, after my daughter has grown up, the lasting legacy of parenting that she receives from us is not going to be a series of speeches nor a set of philosophies. What she will take with her through the rest of her life is a collection of memories, of moments we spent together that taught her about life, about love, about pain, and all the other things that truly matter in the end.
As I thought about how to answer my friend’s question, I remembered one particular phone call I received from my Dad at the lowest, darkest time during the past few years. He called to ask me how I was, and he said to me, “Son, life is full of peaks and valleys. You will bounce back from this. You will rise again. Don’t quit.” With that, he hung up.
The same words coming from anybody else’ mouth would have probably sounded hallow to me. But when my Dad said it, I immediately remembered seeing how he dealt with his own times of failures and difficulties in his life. I remembered how Dad faced up to them and took responsibility; how he refused to quit, even when it would have been so easy to do so. How he kept getting back up after life knocked him down. And when Dad said those words to me, I found myself thinking, “Yes. I can do this. I will rise again. Just like Daddy.”
And there it was. The most valuable lesson I learned about parenting. In our success driven Chinese culture, we think the most important job of a parent is to prepare our children for success. We send them to the best schools, sign them up for extra tutoring, pay for the best piano teachers, make sure that they get into the most prestigious universities, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. but I learned that perhaps the most important job I have as a father is not how to prepare Taylor to succeed, but to teach her how to fail.
The truth is, the path of her life will be shaped and defined more by how she handles failure than how she deals with success. And I learned something else: There are a number of people who can help her to succeed in the different arenas of life: teachers, tutors, mentors, coaches, etc. But when it comes to learning how to fail, there are unique lessons that only I, as her father can teach her. If she doesn’t learn it from me, she will not learn it anywhere else.
Yet another note to file away in the “things learned along the way” folder.
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