When No One Prepares Us To Parent, The Most Important Job We Do Come With the Least Training
Parenting shapes generations, yet most of us enter it with nothing more than instinct, memory, and whatever modeling we absorbed, healthy or not, from the adults who raised us.
When you think about it, parenting is the most critical role you will ever have. Yet the preparation for this role is either completely absent or distorted by our untrained parents.
I remember a high school exercise from the ’60s in which teens were given an egg or an apple and told to care for it as though it were an infant. Teens were paired up as father and mother, and the “baby” required 24/7 monitoring. The eggs broke fairly quickly, and the apples were bruised and battered. A few of the apples had big bites taken out of them. Actually, this was a pretty realistic experiment. Our children do get bruised and battered by their parents, and parts of them appear to be damaged.
We require hours of supervised training before we allow a teen to drive. In Maryland, where I live, the teen, or potential driver of any age, must pass a 30‑hour course with at least six hours behind the wheel. Honestly, those six hours sound scary to me. A potential driver must pass a written test on the rules of the road and a practical skills demonstration before they get a license. Yet they can produce children as young as 12 without a single bit of scrutiny.
We know that parenting classes are beneficial. We send abusive parents to classes where they learn to manage their emotions, understand the process of guiding children, and develop skills for problem‑solving and building emotional connections with their children. However, to participate in one of these classes, you have to be court‑ordered after committing a crime of child abuse. Now, think of that.
Why don’t we prepare our teens to parent? I think we have this stodgy sense of parenting as though it is boring, mundane, or tedious. We see ourselves as meant for something grand. I will admit that parenting, like any job, has boring parts and parts that we want to avoid. Yet our character is built in this process, one interaction at a time. Think of the potential for greatness if we prepared our parents to understand developmental processes, to know about emotional development, and to have a way to encourage character building in their children.
Parenting is the most meaningful job on earth. The character we nurture will make the decisions that shape our old age and the end of our lives. The character that we nurture will make decisions that impact the future for generations to come.
Why don’t we have a training ground for parenting?
For more reflections on emotional development, parenting, and family systems, visit Psychology Today’s insights on raising emotionally healthy children and Greater Good’s research on parenting and empathy.
If you’re navigating the challenges of parenting—or healing from the parenting you received—therapy can offer clarity, grounding, and practical tools. Learn more about individual therapy in Maryland and DC or explore therapeutic approaches that support emotional growth for parents and children alike.
By Dr. Gloria K Vanderhorst
