The Parenting ROI: Are You Raising a Captain or a Casualty?
The parenting industrial complex is a predatory beast, a multi-billion-dollar machine fueled by the neuroses of successful adults who think they can buy their way to a “correct” childhood.
It is a parade of soft-handed experts and Instagram gurus selling a version of domestic bliss that is about as real as Trump buying Greenland.
They chase perfection, but parenting is not perfect.
Humans are flawed, and being a parent is the most challenging job I have ever had. Even more demanding than being a Navy SEAL sniper and certainly more terrifying!
It’s also the most rewarding if you do your job right. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that my adult kids (they will always be your babies!) still call to hang out with me. We still have our annual family trips together; they bring their friends or significant others (Tip: always encourage their friends or significant others to join), and we always have a blast.
The Puddle Jumper Philosophy
Here is the cold, hard truth from the parenting arena: Perfection is a ghost. In the SEAL Teams, we did not wait for the weather to clear or the stars to align before we launched. If you wait for the perfect conditions, the target has already moved, and you are left standing in the dirt with a loaded rifle holding nothing but a handful of intentions.
The parenting universe does not hand out medals for flawless execution; it rewards the people who stay in the fight. I have made enough mistakes to fill a cargo plane, but I have learned to embrace the mess.
In my book, Puddle Jumpers, I talk about a moment with my youngest, Tyler, in a Tahoe parking lot. He spotted a gnarly, half-frozen slush puddle and ran for it with the delight of a dog chasing a tennis ball. My default “adult” mode almost shut him down because of the inconvenience and the extra laundry. But I caught myself. I realized that by stopping him, I was just projecting my own hang-ups. I told him to “get after it,” and he launched in full send mode. That is the energy we need. We want to raise kids who jump into life, not around it.
The Only Mission That Matters
Your kids do not need a saint or a plastic role model who never cracks. They need a tether. They need to know that when the sky is falling, you are the one steady constant in their life.
Lead by Example: Kids follow what you do, not what you say. If you want them to be resilient, show them how you handle a loss with dignity. If you want them to get off their phones, take a hard look in the mirror first.
Presence: Consistency is the enemy of the part-time parent. Being a “full-time” parent is not about the hours on the clock; it is about being a constant force in their life.
Don’t Outsource the Captaincy: I see many successful parents who raise unhappy kids because they completely outsourced the job. Your kids need you to be their captain so they can learn to be captains of their own lives one day.
The Parenting ROI
Using your career as an excuse to outsource parenting is a bad investment. You might end up with money in the bank, but you will have kids on a permanent allowance, in therapy, or worse.
Parenting is like investing for retirement. You have to put a little away each month. That effort compounds, grows, and eventually determines your parenting ROI. It is about preparing your children for the world, not protecting them from it.
Ask yourself this question. Are you raising a captain or a casualty?
As we say in the SEAL Teams, "The Only Easy Day was Yesterday”, but today is the only one that counts.
Being caring, competent, loving parents — and knowledgeable about factual child-development science — should matter most when deciding to procreate. Therefore, parental failure seems to occur as soon as the solid decision is made to have a child even though the parent-in-waiting cannot be truly caring, competent, loving and knowledgeable. Afterall, a physically and mentally sound future should be every child’s fundamental right, especially when considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter — particularly one in which the parents too often stop loving each other, frequently fight and eventually divorce.
Many people (which of course includes the biological fathers) will intentionally conceive regardless of not being sufficiently educated about child-development science to ensure parenting in a psychologically functional/healthy manner. It's not that they necessarily are ‘bad parents’; rather, many seem to perceive thus treat human procreative ‘rights’ as though they (potential parents) will somehow, in blind anticipation, be innately inclined to sufficiently understand and appropriately nurture their children’s naturally developing minds and needs.
In the book Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How You Can Heal, the author writes that even “well-meaning and loving parents can unintentionally do harm to a child if they are not well informed about human development” (pg.24). ... I’ve talked to parents of dysfunctional/unhappy grown children who assert they’d have reared their cerebrally developing kids much more knowledgeably about child-development science.
As liberal democracies, we cannot prevent anyone from bearing children, not even the plainly incompetent and reckless procreators. We can, however, educate all young people for the most important job ever, even those high-school teens who plan to remain childless. If nothing else, such child-development curriculum could offer students an idea/clue as to whether they’re emotionally suited for the immense responsibility and strains of parenthood. … Really, given what's at stake, they at least should be equipped with such valuable science-based knowledge!
Excellent.
Truth.