How to Be a Gardener Parent
“You can do it,” I told my 7-year-old son. “We won’t stop until you get it. I know you can handle it. “
Oh, how I regret these words. These are not exactly encouraging words. We have been practicing violin for over 30 minutes, which is much more than the 15-20 minutes of daily practice that I recommend to my youngest students. My son didn’t want to study violin. At one point he was thrilled when he studied, but – and I didn’t realize it then – I suppressed his enthusiasm with my soaring, excessive mentoring and obsessive “faith in him.”
I became what Alison Gopnik calls a carpenter parent. Gopnik, professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About Parent-Child Relationships , in which she describes two distinct types of parents: gardeners and carpenters.
Gardening parent versus carpenter parent
According to Gopnik, the carpenter parent believes that it is within his power to determine who their child will become. Like a carpenter with his truckload of specialized tools, a carpenter parent believes that if they raise their child in the “right” way, they can influence a particular outcome. It was I who tried to turn my son into a prodigy. You can see how well it worked.
On the other hand, the gardening parent knows and accepts that many variables are outside their control. The gardening parent provides a supportive environment, but realizes that you cannot force the outcome, just as the gardener cannot control when the sun shines, or how big the plant will grow or bear fruit.
Gopnik recommends that if we are to develop our children’s self-esteem, curiosity, and tenacity, we should strive to be more like a gardener. If you, like me, are upsetting yourself and your child by trying to get them to squeeze themselves into a round hole, try these tips to start parenting like a gardener:
Offer options, not instructions
In the book, Gopnik described how, in one study, researchers learned that when a four-year-old was given a complex toy along with instructions for using the toy, the child only played with the toy as shown. … However, when the same toy was offered without instructions, the child experimented until he discovered many of the toy’s other possibilities.
Children are naturally curious and have an innate drive to learn. Just as it is tempting for a parent to invest knowledge in our child in the form of constant guidance, but just as a plant will take what it needs from the soil in the garden at its convenient time, so the child will assimilate new information when they are all good and ready. The gardening parent just makes sure the information is readable.
Observe without interfering
After my epic failure in trying to turn my son into a child prodigy, my husband and I noticed that he loved rock music. My aunt gave him a toy plastic guitar, and he constantly pretended to play it. We gave him a small toy guitar that could tune the strings, and lo and behold, he figured out how to play a few notes on it.
So we bought him a real guitar and found him a teacher. The teacher’s methods are completely different from mine, and Lucas gets better every week, so I try not to get involved in this (let alone remind him to practice). He has been playing for 5 years now and is still gaining momentum; at this moment I’m just driving.
Resolve failure
It is difficult, but very important. My son has ADHD, so when he is struggling in school, I often lean toward saving him. But he is now 13 years old, and I know he must learn to manage his diagnosis and protect himself.
We provided skills and techniques and now he has to use them (or not) and feel the consequences anyway. Gardening parents are willing to let their child fail because it allows them to experience the consequences of their actions – a valuable lesson that fosters accountability and free will and sets them up for independence. And isn’t that our ultimate goal as parents?