I often see parents at my private therapy practice in Hertfordshire and we often look at the values of a ‘good parent’. I get the pair to brainstorm ideas about what key things a parent should do or provide in order to be classed as a ‘good parent’. Typically there are a few things that always show up like love and education and those sorts of things. We end up with all of these post-it notes with their ideas written down – one idea per post-it note – and we get rid of all the duplicates. Then we have to put them into some kind of order and sequence – agreeing as a pair as to what that order and sequence should be. What we end up with are the top ten things that a ‘good parent’ does. And it makes for a really interesting conversation.

You start to notice how people’s values around parenting differ, which is very interesting when you have two parents who came together to make a baby. Are their values the same? Maybe, maybe not. It also starts to highlight what it is we think we need versus what we really need.

Why am I sharing this exercise with you? Well, today I’ve been thinking about how it is that we educate children – particularly in schools. I think that here in the Uk, we quite rightly, do have a really strong emphasis on education and definitely having a good education offers you more potential, more possibilities than you would get without it. However, I do sometimes wonder if some of the more important stuff gets missed out.

This is how it ties in with the exercise I explained above. Very often everyone’s top number one thing that a ‘good parent’ provides is love, but when you start to weigh that up against other things sometimes love doesn’t even make it to the top 10! For example, being a good listener is, in my opinion, something that’s really useful in the context of parenting. If I was weighing up whether I had a parent who would listen to me and show an interest in my life versus they love me and so it’s okay if they don’t listen, I would rather go with the listening.

The thing with love is it’s quite a selfish emotion. There’s a difference between feeling love for someone but potentially doing nothing about that, and showing someone that you love them, and showing someone that you love them in the way that they need to experience it. Those are three very different sorts of things and love is a little bit too all-encompassing to differentiate between them. There are parents who put their children in danger who love their children, but are they actually giving them what they need?

So it got me thinking about education: in that, we provide on the most part a very high standard of education, particularly in the UK and certainly compared to some other countries. But is it all of what they really need? Is there other important stuff that should be in there too? If we could back off the education pressures a little bit and find that they still develop because they’re getting this other stuff instead, like good manners, showing kindness and caring for others, empathy and compassion. Does that get taught and does it get taught enough?

Now if you are a parent of children then I would hope that this is stuff that you make a point of focusing on and developing those values in your children. But not every parent does, not every parent knows how to even if they wanted to. It is something that I personally believe should be part of how we educate; we should educate in ways that help children to develop things like respect and caring and forgiveness, but I’m not sure that that’s something that’s ever going to make it onto the curriculum.

I just wanted to raise it with you, because I suppose what I feel is that we have a responsibility to make sure that this happens. Those young people that we work with now are going to be our carers when we’re old and we’re in nursing homes – so I just want to know they’ve got the basics down! I want to know that they’re going to be good people as well as intelligent ones.

So just take a moment to consider what it is that’s really important.

By Gemma Bailey
www.NLP4Kids.org/gemma-bailey