Paradox and Inspiration 113: When Parenting is Reduced to Numbers

Parenting is hard. Being a stay-at-home-mum is freaking scary. A big part of the reason is because we do not get a report on how well we are faring in this herculean task, what have been done correctly and wrongly, how much more we should do…

I do not ask to be a perfect parent, but I need to know if I've been a bad parent and how far I am from being a good one. I want to know if giving up my job to be with them is a correct decision, I want to know if what I've done is all worth it. The same principles of performance and reward in the corporate environment cannot be applied in this enormous parenting venture. At work, we have performance indicators to tell us how much have been achieved, how far we are from our targets and goals. At the end of the year, we get appraisal from the bosses.

Like every parent, I want my children to be healthy, happy, and successful in every way, I want to be a key contributor to that end goal. I can so easily forget that "Sucess of loving is not the results, but the loving itself." I must not reduce parenting to numbers – good health reports, good grades, good behaviour, good conduct, good reports from the school, but that feeling of insecurity just creeps in when you know that even if their school report cards record flying colours or they topping the class, it still doesn't mean I have been a good parent.

How to measure the emotional aspect and happiness of my children? Their smiles, their laughter? What a poster I saw said crystal clear - "For a child, love is spelled as T.I.M.E". Perhaps, by just being with them, offering a word of encouragement or a hug of assurance of my presence counts a hundred times more than those endless nights of coaching for school exam.


"The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent."
~Erich Fromm~