The challenge of parenting in our age!

Sometimes it means producing an idealised version of the child we wish we had been. Sometimes it means preparing children intelligently for the realities of their own age. And sometimes, unfortunately, parenting amounts to little more than providing food, education and shelter while leaving emotional and intellectual development largely unattended.

The first temptation is self-projection. Many Pakistani parents imagine their children as extensions of themselves. A doctor wants another doctor, a businessman expects someone to continue the business, and parents who struggled for social mobility often decide very early what prestigious career their children must pursue.

There is nothing wrong with transmitting experience or values. The problem begins when guidance becomes replication. A child is biologically connected to the parent but psychologically belongs to a different generation.

Temperament, interests and circumstances may all be different. When parents insist that children reproduce their choices, inheritance can quietly become imprisonment. A second tendency is perfectionism.

Children must attend the best school, secure the highest grades, enter medicine, engineering, civil service or some fashionable profession, and speak impeccable English. Social comparison strengthens the pressure. Another child's examination results, university admission or professional achievement quickly becomes a benchmark against which one's own child is measured.

Children may gradually conclude that their value depends upon performance. Failure becomes frightening not merely because something has gone wrong, but because parental approval itself appears endangered. At the opposite end lies parental disengagement.

Some parents confuse freedom with absence. They provide material necessities but know remarkably little about what their children think, fear, watch, believe or experience. In an era when smartphones, algorithms, influencers and peer networks compete constantly for children's attention, parental withdrawal does not create a neutral space.

It simply allows other forces to become the educators. The more sensible alternative is realistic parenting - raising children for the world they are entering rather than the world their parents remember. This distinction has become especially important in Pakistan.

Parents who grew up believing that a university degree automatically produced a secure career are raising children in an economy where qualifications alone increasingly guarantee very little. AI is transforming professions. Employment patterns are changing.

Information is abundant while judgement is scarce. Communication, adaptability, emotional intelligence, creativity and the capacity to learn continuously may matter as much as traditional academic credentials. Realistic parenting therefore requires a change of question.

Instead of asking, "How can my child become what I want? ", parents might ask, "What capacities will this child need to flourish twenty years from now? "Yet realism should not mean surrendering children completely to contemporary culture.

Children should understand technology without becoming enslaved by it; become ambitious without measuring human worth entirely through money; develop confidence without arrogance; compete without losing empathy; and learn independence without abandoning responsibility toward family and society. The most constructive model may therefore be developmental parenting.

Such parents neither manufacture replicas of themselves nor attempt to engineer perfect children. They provide values without dictating every conclusion, boundaries without suffocation, freedom without abandonment and guidance without permanent control. Their authority changes as the child grows.

Parenting that refuses to evolve eventually becomes control.