Nobody knows anything.
—William Goldman
As a parent, it’s really easy to force your kids to do stuff. You’re bigger than them. You control the purse strings. You possess the legal and moral authority to make them do what you think is best for them. But when you wield that power without so much as a conversation, you’re teaching them that they have no power, no control, that their wishes don’t really matter in your house, in this life.
You’re also setting up a bad habit for yourself. You won’t always have this power over them. You don’t want to habituate a kind of disrespect for, or disinterest in, what they think they want. Because one day, they’ll want to change their college major. They’ll want to move across the country. They’ll want to make some lifestyle change you disagree with. They’ll want to tweak some long-standing family tradition. And you will be so used to thinking that you know better, that you are the decider, that you won’t be able to handle it. Especially the part where they don’t have to listen to you. But worse than that, your relationship with your kids won’t be able to weather the fallout from your egotistical implosion.
Your kids don’t always know what they want. But guess what? Nobody does. So you have to figure out how to be in charge without being a tyrant, how to generally know better without being a know-it-all. You have to learn how to use the gravity of your experience to move them gently in the direction they should go, instead of using the mass of your position as parent to force them that way.
This won’t be easy . . . but such is the life (and balancing act) of being a parent.