Doing psychiatry has given me a lot of time and opportunity to think about what it really means to "care" for your children. So many parents seem to think that caring means doing everything for your children and letting them have as much and as many opportunities as possible.
Yet I hear a mother saying that when she left home and married, she did not know how to cook and had the worst few months of her life trying to learn to run a house.
I see an eighteen year old boy who still jumps on the couch, has no sense of the value of work or of money and has a sense of entitlement which is going to get him disappointed some day very soon, I suspect.
So I wonder - isn't true care to prepare your children for the world? To teach them about work and limits and manners and skills? To give them a sense of personal discipline and achievement, as well as opportunities? To teach them that they have to commit and see their commitments through?
In short: to care is to discipline.
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