Guidance of parents cannot be assumed to be finite

Dear Editor,

I was glad to read SN’s editorial of Wednesday 19 December, 2018 on Parenting Decisions, along with the complementary letter about the choice of higher education for one’s child.

The discourse vividly reminds of a view expressed decades ago by a Professor of Psychological Medicine at the University of California. It ran something like this: “there can be no validity in a parent declaring to his or her child ‘I was a child like you’”. For the Professor posited, the socio-psychological environment changes, however subliminally, with each generation.

From the perspective of one who did not have the benefit of the parental guidance so solemnly adverted to, the discourse would appear to exclude the wide range of children who would have experienced a variety of connections to, and indeed disconnections with parents who pretend to know better, simply because of their seniority; while at the same time overlooking the limitations that may well have complemented their own success.

A contemporary of my generation, which incidentally, benefitted from a much better quality of local education than now obtains, was so constrained by his parents’ ambition that he should pursue the profession of medicine, spent critical years failing the University examinations, and finally having to leave.

As it turned out, he ventured into his long recognised predilection for the English language and in comparatively short time grew to be an international journalist, who next towered in the field of education to become a Professor of English at a highly recognised North American University. But what of those like this writer, who (un)fortunately received no guidance whatever, and in its absence had to search for the right path to professional success.

What was critical in such an environment of uncertainty was the support and mentoring of coaches other than parents.

In the instant case the implication of arbitrariness in decision-making was that critically at least two persons may not have been consulted, i.e. the child’s principal teacher, and of course, the child itself.

The guidance of parents cannot be assumed to be finite.

Yours faithfully, (Name and address supplied)