The Essential “Cs” of Parenting Success

Extraordinary philosopher Tom V. Morris shared his parenting wisdom with The Mommy-Muse. These are universal conditions for doing anything successfully, with a special focus on parenting.

Here is Tom’s empowering framework:

1. Conception

“In any situation, any challenge, whether it’s at work, at home, relationship building, parenting, we need a clear conception of what we want to see happen. We need a vivid vision, a goal clearly imagined. Often, we don’t set goals in our personal lives and in our child raising. It doesn’t even occur to us. It’s like when I was a student, I didn’t set goals in my classes. I felt that was the professor’s job. You become a great student when you learn to ask yourself, ‘What do I want to get out of this class, and how can I go about doing it.’

It’s the same with parenting. Being able to set goals is very important and to have as clear a conception of what you want to see happen as possible, that helps you organize your experience and move forward in positive ways.”

2. Confidence

“You can have a clear conception of what you want, but if you don’t bring confidence to you what you’re doing, you won’t even try. We need a strong confidence that we can attain our goal. Champions in every walk of life, championship athletes, great business people, great scientists, always have tremendous confidence about what they’re doing

It’s important to have competence. It’s important to learn the basics. You have to be competent first of all, but confidence goes beyond that. No matter how well you’ve trained, no matter how many child raising and parenting books you’ve read, there are always situations you’re going to confront that are a little bit different. You haven’t quite read about this one before. This is a new twist. This is an unexpected angle. You have to be able to create your own confidence to say, ‘You know what; I can do this.’

We are put in this world because – how many hundreds of generations of parents have there been before us who thought they didn’t know what they were doing? We exist only because they did it right.

We can be confident that we’ve got this genetic endowment to approach new situations with some degree of confidence and to make good outcomes happen.”

3. Concentration

“We need a focused concentration on what it takes to reach the goal. It’s one thing to have goals. It’s another thing to have confidence. You see on American Idol and on The Apprentice and all of these shows, you see people with big dreams and big confidence, and sometimes you think, ‘They don’t seem to have a clue on what it’s going to take to get where they want to go.’

We need to learn to break it down, to plan our moves forward, divide, and conquer. Yeah, you want your child to go to Harvard one day. What do you have to do to move in that direction? Or, you want your child to grow up to be a happy, well-functioning adult. What do you have to do, each step along the way? You have to learn to break it down into intermediate and more immediate goals in support of your ultimate dream, little things add up.”

Stay tuned for Part Two of The Seven Cs of Parenting Success! If you like what you’re reading, you’ll love Tom Morris’s book: The Art of Achievement: Mastering the 7 Cs of Success.