A Parenting Bias you Don’t want
A journey exploring the importance of parenting from a position of both, “student and teacher.” Parenting isn’t supposed to be a one-way road.
From the moment we meet our children, all the way through their life we think they are the most adorable little creatures our eyes have ever gazed upon. This cognitive bias is known as the “in-group bias.” This bias is dominantly perceived to be advantageous because it allows us to protect our children and other kinship. And I’m certain most people would agree that this indeed, is a positive attribute we’d like to keep around.
So, if I’m not referencing the “in-group bias,” what bias am I referencing? What bias don’t we want to dominate our parenting? To the best of my knowledge, this bias has not been labelled like many of the other cognitive biases we know in the world today. So, for the sake of referencing it in this blog post, let’s refer to this bias as the “one-way road” bias. It has been my experience that most, if not all parents operate from this bias, “I am the parent and I am supposed to parent you, and so parent you I will. End of story.” And then they wonder why and where the discord comes from in their relationship with their child(ren). For some, maybe the resistance is heavy on the front end presenting more in infancy or toddlerhood. For others, it’s the teen years they remember as, “being especially more difficult”. And lastly, still a few parents look at their grown children and shake their head, wondering what happened to that sweet baby and docile child?
By rule of thumb, biases are supposed to help us make sense of the world with enriched speed to that of our default settings. Think of the recursion function on your phone that tries to guess what word you’re typing when you send a text message (does anyone even use that function? 😉). Similar in nature to this process, a cognitive bias is born when our brain chronically attempts to simplify information for the sake of being helpful. What transpires with the one-way road bias is a limited conversation, built by the three words that pop-up as a guess in lieu of leveraging the endless horizon of our language. The one-way road bias is like the friend who accidentally spills ketchup on your blouse and then repeatedly wipes it with their napkin, hoping to lift the stain when in reality they are only making the stain worse. When we allow the one-way road bias to dominate our parenting, we over pressurize ourselves as parents and silence our life’s greatest teachers. Obviously, there are oodles of practical and soft skills we, as parents, need to teach our children. But, what about the practical and soft skills our children are here to be teaching us? If you read that last sentence and it was news to you, or perhaps it even evoked a defense mechanism masked by haughtiness (“Hump! My children can’t teach me anything!”), you could be allowing the one-way road bias to dominate your parenting experience. Now before you allow yourself to feel insecure, remember earlier I stated, this is your brain’s attempt at being helpful. This bias isn’t personal to you, me, or any other parent in the world. It’s just our brain’s best guess at helping us navigate parenthood.
As well-meaning as it is, this bias often leads to parents not trusting their innate wisdom or parenting intuition. Which in turn can escalate to spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars in unnecessary doctor and ER visits. Most popular, the one-way road bias leads to hours upon hours of rabbit hole jumping on the internet perpetuated by fear. The fearful thought that, “I’m doing this all wrong.” And furthermore, the one-way road bias discourages parent’s from asking themselves the important question, “what can I learn from my child?”
Parents that awaken to the shortcomings of this bias freely spend more time playing with their child(ren). They are more likely to prioritize nourishing their own personal and relational needs than parent’s who do not. And perhaps most boldly stated, parents who exchange the one-way road bias for a two-way road bias are more likely to report higher levels of parenting across a lifetime. That is because they are naturally under less pressure and open to receiving the life lessons our children are put here on Earth to teach us. Parenting from a two-way road ultimately leads to a more fulfilling experience for both children and parents across a lifetime.