What will your children's legacy be?

One of the gifts Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, left the world was the commencement speech he gave at the Stanford College graduation in 2005. This speech captured the wisdom he had learned from his experiences - wisdom that can help us as parents.

Dreams for Your Children

What dreams do you have for your children? Do you hope that they will one day go to college? Steve Jobs biological mom sure did. She was an unwed college graduate student and decided to have him adopted by college graduates. However, these college graduates wanted a girl not a boy so he ended up being adopted by a mom who had not graduated from college and a dad who had not graduated from high school.

His biological mom only agreed to sign the adoption papers after the couple agreed they would send Steve to college. Did they keep their promise? Yes. He attended Reed College for six months before deciding the cost of spending his parents' savings wasn't worth it.

Although he dropped out of college, he found a way to attend some of the classes that interested him the most. While he did not attend college in the way his biological mom hoped he would, he did learn what he needed to know to pursue his own dreams.

Your Children's Great Work

What type of work do you hope your children will someday have? Your children are deeply attuned to your desires for them.

(read the rest of the article at Priceless Parenting)

Too good to leave

Ben returned to live at home after completing his 4-year college degree. He promised his parents he would look for a job. When Ben didn’t seem to be making much progress in actually searching for a job, his mom set up an appointment for him with a job coach.

The job coach gave Ben a number of assignments to complete before the initial meeting. Ben came to the meeting but hadn’t completed any of the homework. Eventually he explained to the job coach that he really liked just living at home – his mom did the laundry, cooked delicious meals and he had plenty of time for video games and TV.

Setting limits with adult children isn’t easy but it is necessary. If you are struggling to set limits with your adult children, there are books on parenting adult children that you may find helpful.

Carrying Past Problems Around

Ann described how she helped her foster daughter, Megan, appreciate the impact all her past problems were having on her current life. Ann gathered a big pile of different size rocks. For each problem from Megan’s past, like how poorly she was treated by her mother, Ann instructed Megan to pick out a rock to represent it. They went through all the different terrible things that had happened to Megan. For each one Megan picked out the size rock that represented that horrible event.

Once she had selected all the rocks, Ann asked Megan to get a backpack from her room. She then instructed Megan to put all the rocks in the backpack and put the backpack on. How does it feel to wear the backpack? “It’s really heavy.” Take the backpack off. How does that feel? “Much better!”

Ann then compared constantly carrying around all those past problems to carrying the heavy backpack filled with rocks. She encouraged Megan to consider which rocks she could leave out knowing that she could always come back and pick those rocks up later. This exercise really helped Megan feel how she was allowing her past problems to influence her current situation.

Adult children back at home

Just when you thought your children were out on their own, they’re back! According to Jane Adams in her book When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us: Letting Go of Their Problems, Loving Them Anyway, and Getting on with Our Lives, 58% of 21 – 24-year-olds live at home or have boomeranged back in the last two years; for 25 – 34-year-olds, the figure is 34 percent.

She discusses the tricky parts of helping your adult children learn to thrive on their own. It’s important to come up with an arrangement that supports your children while encouraging them to move out on their own. This arrangement needs to include things like

• Expectations for paying rent, utilities and insurance


• Conditions for staying at home


• Plans for employment


• A time table for moving out

The closer you can model what life is like in the real world, the more likely your child is to be able to successfully transition to independent living.

When consequences are years away

It’s far easier to learn something when the consequences are immediate. It doesn’t take children long to learn not to touch a hot stove. What’s really difficult is changing behavior to avoid a problem where the consequences will not be seen for years if at all.

Gal Baras describes how much he’s always enjoyed being out in the sun and how recently he discovered he had skin cancer on his head. He writes about a number of things he’s learned from his experience including “Sunscreen is not just for sissies and parents are not out to make their kids look uncool outside. Sunscreen can actually prevent serious stuff from happening.”

When consequences are years away, telling our children other people’s real life stories may help them learn from other people’s consequences. Children may also reject these stories with “that won’t happen to me”. In that case if children can actually talk to someone who has experienced the consequences, the story will likely have a greater impact.

Children Shooting Guns

Children and guns are a dangerous combination. On Tuesday an angry 4-year-old Ohio boy got a gun out of a closet and shot his baby sitter. Luckily the baby sitter will recover. What is especially disturbing about this story is that it wasn’t an accident. This preschooler knew both the location of the gun and how to use it.

Another gun tragedy involving a 4-year-old occurred last June when a South Carolina girl shot herself in the chest. This occurred when she took a gun out of her grandmother’s purse during a shopping trip at Sam’s Club.

In November an 8-year-old Arizona boy killed his father and another man using a .22-caliber rifle. His father had taught him how to shoot a gun to kill prairie dogs. Apparently the boy kept a tally of his spankings and had decided that the 1,000th spanking would be the last.

Clearly this 8-year-old boy learned to shoot a gun quite well. While parents can certainly teach their children to shoot guns at a young age, their brains are not sufficiently developed to handle decisions around appropriately using guns.

While most parents would agree that teaching preschoolers to shoot guns is too young, when can a child safely learn to shoot a gun? Recent research has shown that it takes about 25 years for a person’s brain to fully develop. The part of the brain that controls reasoning and impulses is the last to develop. We know teenagers and young adults can have difficulty controlling their emotions and impulsive behaviors. Unfortunately, upset teens with access to guns may lead to deadly results.

Many U.S. children have access to guns since about 35% of U.S. households have guns. Guns in the hands of children and young adults put all our children at risk. It’s time to figure out a better way to handle guns so that these types of tragedies stop.

Spending time together

Being able to spend fun times together with our children is part of what makes being a parent so rewarding. We just returned from a six day trip to Leavenworth, a Bavarian town in the mountains a couple hours from Seattle. Our trip was extended an extra day when we were snowed in because all the mountain passes were closed due to avalanche danger. We’ve had a lot of snow this year!

We’ve been going on this yearly trip for the past 12 years with another family. It’s a special time we spend together cross country skiing, sledding, hot tubbing, playing games and of course eating. My children are now 16 and 13; they happily anticipate spending New Year’s Eve in Leavenworth each year. After being home for a day, my 16-year-old daughter wistfully said she already missed being together as a family in Leavenworth.

Although we don’t have a large home, upon arriving home we each quickly go our separate ways for much of the day … busily putting away gear, washing clothes and taking care of many other tasks. When we’re in Leavenworth, the time is magical because we focus completely on doing fun things together. There are no chores, no school work and very few worries. Being able to spend special time together as a family is truly priceless!

Mom was right again

There were many words of wisdom I heard from my parents growing up. I’ve recently managed to forget my Mom’s wise advice a couple times and unfortunately suffered the consequences. She always told me not to drop sharp knives into the soapy dishwater but instead hold them by the handle while washing them. Well the other day I reached into the dishwater to retrieve a sharp knife I was letting soak and promptly cut my finger. Ouch!

She also warned me never to leave the kitchen if I had something on the stove. That’s a tough one for me since I love doing more than one thing at a time. I was cooking jelly and decided to jump on the computer for just a minute while it came to a boil. You guessed it … I totally forgot about the jelly until I smelled it burning on the stove after it boiled over! What a mess!

Although I live 1,700 miles from my parents, my Mom may have heard me proclaim “Mom, you were right!” I now have a strongly renewed desire to heed her advice! The influence parents have on their children lasts a lifetime.