Old people are always very impatient with young ones. Fathers always expect their sons to have their virtues without their faults.
—Winston Churchill
We expect so much of our kids. We push them. We prod them. We tell them what to do. We punish them—however lightly—when they fall short.
What we lose track of is how impossible our expectations often are for these little humans who lack the decades of life experience we’re absent- mindedly taking for granted.
There is no blueprint. To assume there is or, worse, to imagine there is and then hold your kids to those expectations is wildly unfair. Can we have expectations for our kids? Yes. Can we try to make sure they don’t fall into the same traps or develop the same vices as us? It would be criminal if we didn’t.
But we have to remember that they are like us . . . for better and for worse. They’ve lived their whole lives in the same house as us. They’ve learned from our examples—even the bad ones . . . especially the bad ones in many cases. They’re not going to be perfect. They’re going to have our weaknesses . . . perhaps some of their own too. And to punish them with our unrealistic expectations, even unintentionally, quite literally for the sins of the father, is profoundly unfair.
Our job is to love them and to be patient with them, not to demand the impossible from them.