Dating : The Most Important Job in the World Almost No One Prepares For

Everyone can do it, but many don’t do it well

“You are still young. Be careful. You need to start preparing now.”

I used to work in a clinic for children with special needs. There, I worked with Kyle*, a therapist who had a child with special needs himself.

One day, Kyle was telling me about his son when out of the blue, he turned to me and warned me to prepare.

What did he mean?

Kyle had been telling me about the increasing rate of children born with mental challenges like autism. He believed that the cause for this increase, and for his own son’s condition, was pollution. Pollution in the air, water, food, and ground.

So he wanted to tell me:

If you want to have healthy kids in the future, plan now to avoid polluting your body.

Kyle’s warning resonated with me all these years, not just because I agree with him about taking care of my physical health, but because he was, in essence, telling me to think ahead about parenting.

In today’s popular culture, parenting is not a popular topic.

Celebrities and media leaders don’t advise teens or young adults to think about having or raising children. When they do, it’s usually in a negative light (Think: Teen Mom).

That’s a huge mistake.

Parenting is one of the most crucial “jobs” in the world. We were all raised by someone, and the way we turned out is largely thanks to them, for good or ill.

And real, responsible parenting is more than acquiring a child through birth or adoption and then providing food and shelter.

The most critical part of parenting is guiding a child’s mental and moral development and promoting their physical/mental/spiritual health.

Great parenting requires you yourself to be a healthy, mature man or woman of character, strength, and strong morals so that you can help your future kid(s) navigate this complicated and dangerous world.

And those are not the types of characteristics that you can turn off and on at will, whenever you want. They take time to develop.

In other words:

Being a good parent begins LONG BEFORE you become a parent.

Granted, there are people who don’t want to be parents, even without media influence.

But many more DO expect to be parents “someday,” yet do nothing about it now.

If you want to be a good parent, if you realize how critical parenting is to everyone’s future (not just your child’s future, but your own, and your society’s — even the world!), there are things you can do to get ready.

No one runs a marathon without training — not unless they want to get cramps and collapse a quarter of the way in.

So why do so many people fail to think about parenting until they find themselves saddled with a kid?

There are things you can do think about and prepare for your future role as a parent:

• Choosing your spouse: If you are serious about taking on the mission of raising a healthy, positive future generation, DON’T choose to have children with a guy or girl who doesn’t have the same vision. You’re just setting yourself up for future pain.
• Working on yourself: The most important thing about teaching kids is not what school you put your kids in, but what kind of example you are being to them at home. Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away. If you want your kids to be kind, respectful, happy, whatever, you need to be those things first.
• Selecting the environment: Where are you choosing to live? When we are young adults, especially in today’s “global village,” we have a lot more flexibility in travel. Many people move around while they are young, following jobs and hobbies, which is fine, but consider this: you never know where you might “meet someone” and where you might end up. If you know you are getting close to that time when you are planning to settle down, consider where you are. Is this where you want to raise your kids?
• Educating yourself: Every child is different, but there are people who have left behind words of wisdom about child-raising that you can read. There are people who have successfully (or are successfully) raising bright, healthy, kind children that you can talk to. Why re-invent the wheel and make your own mistakes when you can learn from these people and avoid common errors?

You don’t have total control over ANY of the above factors, of course. But just because you can’t control every outcome does not mean you should not invest in the process.

Everyone is theoretically able to become a parent if they want to.

Most people plan to have kids in an old-fashioned way. But even if you can’t or don’t want to have biological children, adoption is an option.

And even childless adults have a bigger impact than they think on the younger people they interact with.

There are many stand-in “honorary” parents for children who don’t have, or have failed to bond with biological or adoptive parents. Most of these honorary parents don’t even know who their honorary children are (ie, movie stars, public figures).

In other words, we will all, one day, be responsible for raising children. Either biological, adopted, or honorary children.

Every generation is heavily influenced by the parenting decisions of the generations before them.

What you do in private, in your home, with your children — or in public, online, where many children hang out — creates ripples that affect your country, your government, your world.

The repercussions are mind-boggling.

So no shirking parental duties allowed. Not if you don’t want to send your entire world to “hell in a handbasket,” so to speak.

And if you want to be a parent someday, you need to start preparing, now.

Even if you don’t plan to be a parent, prepare anyway. You may not have little eyes watching your every move at home one day, but I guarantee you will have little eyes watching you when you are outside your home in the future.

There will always be areas of improvement when it comes to something as complex as parenting, of course. Parents are human, and humans always make mistakes.

But some of these mistakes are more massive than others, and some more avoidable than others.

If we all plan ahead and prepare, we can raise a generation that is happier, healthier, stronger, and better than we are.

That may not sound terribly exciting to you if you’re more focused on your own career advancement and pleasure right now, but the thing you need to remember is:

You’re not going to last forever.

Besides, living self-centered-ly only lasts for so long before you find out that you’ve been living in a house of cards.

So think ahead, care for others. Plan for the future — not just your own, but everyone’s future, by investing in future people: your (biological, adopted, and/or honorary) children.

Then, no matter what else you do in life, you will have left your mark in the halls of history, one that will linger on long after you do.

*names have been changed