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One of the great debates about parenting, or in my case what I call “proxy parenting”, is how much control you should exert over a child’s choices. A child, being defined as a person who is under the “legal age of maturity.” Choices being defined as the set of options and the process of sacrificing a set of them for one or a few.
As adults, even those only slightly older than our “proxy children”, we know that procrastination and avoidance is a choice in itself. Not making a choice is still making a choice. We have a heightened sense of urgency that middle schoolers and high schoolers don’t have.
We reflect our experiences onto our children like mirrors — our triumphs, mistakes, heartbreaks, and comebacks. We think, at some level, that they may repeat our shameful family history. Or worse, that they are the key for us to redeem our own.
Our entire lives up to this point dictate how we parent. Specifically, how we guide our children to make decisions or refute making them at all.
There are two extremes of how parents approach this part of parenting. I’ll illustrate in this wonderful, timely example:
