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Comment by weatherlite | Hacker News Reader

> Parents should focus on enabling their children to be: Curious; Resourceful; Self-reliant (to feel they have agency in the world); Compassionate; Value personal integrity, themselves, their ideas / wishes, and time on the planet; Able to cooperate, communicate, and work as a team; Able to make sacrifices for the future versions of themselves ("I'm having a bad day today, what can I do to make tomorrow me have a better day?"); Able to enjoy life and find fulfillment (however small) even in bad times.

Could be nice to have if the parents knew how to do all that themselves ...

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This list is my notes on what I'd like to be able to pass on after my limited 10 years of parenting. That learning process has been primarily an exercise about where I, too, need to develop. Parenting... you do your best even though it's not enough.

I'd also add that I struggled with the word 'teach' or 'guide' and settled on 'enable'. Different kids (and parents) have different intrinsic abilities or interest in each of these categories. Doing your best to make it at least possible for a child to see the value of them and possibly even make progress is already a great accomplishment.

Don't get me wrong I like that list and agree with everything in it. I just think, as others have said, kids are smart. They pick up on our shit and unfortunately internalize a lot of our values, insecurities, biases, anxieties.

You can't really teach/enable any of that stuff for real without living it yourself and being an example - which is very difficult because most of us weren't really raised that way ourselves, so we're not like that.

I'm not so sure what my point is other than that change is very difficult and raising children is difficult and raising them to be genuinely good people will be very hard without change.

Amen. When I realized this, it let me chill out a lot as a parent of smol kids. There's as many good parents as there are good people, is my rough heuristic now. So I try to focus on being a good person, the rest is at the margins.

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