Recently, my thoughts have gone to a line in Leonard Cohen’s poem Anthem – “forget your perfect offerings”. The preceding line says to “ring the bells that still can ring.” I thought of this when listening to a discussion between grandchildren. Perhaps at their ages, stages, they see many bells that still can ring and want to ring them all.
One of my grandson’s advised his younger cousin not to take the advice of parents too seriously. He reported that he had rejected all of his father’s advice until he heard the same thing from others and found it out himself. He later learned that everything his father told him was true but it didn’t have any effect until he learned it from his own experience.
I wonder if it is a characteristic of parents to want their children to learn from the parent’s experience, perhaps with the thought of preventing them from making mistakes. Perhaps it is also characteristic of many children to believe they will not make the mistakes they think their parents may have made.
Some years ago, my son asked his father if someone had died and left him some money. His father asked what made him think that, and my son replied that repairs needed in the house for some time now were being taken care of. Apparently, it did not occur to him that household money management was involved in putting aside funds needed for the repairs.
Perhaps it may also be that children do not understand why they are unable to have everything they want and attribute the limits on available funds to parental inadequacy, or to mistakes a parent has made that they will not make. It is only through their own life experience ringing different bells that they learn which ones may ring for them and perhaps it is also what leads them eventually to give up their “perfect offering.”
It is this ongoing cycle of parents wanting children to learn from the parents’ own life experience, and children insisting on learning from the realities of their own lives, that makes the world move forward. In any case, that is the belief of some of today’s leading innovators, such as Musk, Bezos, and Buffett.
Grandparents, on the other hand may see the value in both sides, agreeing with what parents have learned through experience, yet identifying and supporting grandchildren in their own quests and search for their own life experience. Perhaps that can be a major contribution of grandparents to their grandchildren’s lives.
Good Enough Mothering 