Why Now: A Parenting Dilemma

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”  T.S. Eliot

I recently finished my book on parenting called "Becoming a Better Parent: Ten Things We Needed To Learn Growing Up" and I'm in the process of looking for a publisher. I wanted to start this blog to create a forum to address the importance of parenting. However, you might be asking yourself  “why another book on parenting?” History has shown us that understanding and defining parenting is one of the most important tasks we face. Parents, and those who support them, carry the weight of our future generations and our responsibility to our children is critical to the success of our civilization.

However “Becoming a Better Parent” does not mean “making better children.” The idea that we can mix together all the right ingredients for a parental soup that we can then force feed our children is only a recipe for disaster. Current parenting approaches have made it difficult to address these aspects of self-determinism related to free will and choice and cannot be fully explained or appreciated with our current cause and effect or social based models of parenting. Simply put no matter “how many kings’ horses or kings’ men” we have acquired about parenting our current models are often unable to determine how to put the parental “humpty dumpty back together again.”

The challenge has been to find a way for us to make sense of this phenomenon and it is only by constructing a model that considers both the parts and whole of the entire parent-child system that we can fully comprehend the true complexities of parenting. There seems to be an obvious theme emerging out of our current models and research of parenting that something else is needed. The very nature of parenting has created gaps in our understanding, as we continue to experience the accelerated rates of change that bombard us from every direction. Most of our current models are unable to embrace an evolving vision for parenting that allows us to deal with instantaneous information.

We all know that there are no all-inclusive parental handbooks and we need to strongly question anyone who would claim differently. However, by creating a parental compass that points within we can start to find our own internal directions in “Becoming a Better Parent.” Finding our way through the parental maze can be difficult and many of us have often found ourselves lost on this journey. This book is intended to be a road map that is provided as a hitchhiker’s guide to parenting. By developing a more compressive directional compass we can better understand the road signs ahead so we can all work together on making this a better place for all our children’s tomorrows.