Imagine a child who is very musically interested and starts taking piano lessons.  He starts out self-motivated and loving the process, but soon Mom develops some goals for his new hobby. There is a scholarship available to a limited number of students that do well at a school competition.  She starts paying attention when he practices and harping on him when he doesn’t.  She complains about all the money she is spending and how little progress he is making.  Practicing that was once looked forward to is now the dreaded time of the day.  The school competition comes up, the child’s nerves get the best of him, and he misses several notes.  Because the focus of this was the outcome, the child has failed.  The mother feels like a failure too.  All that work, fighting, and suffering was for nothing. 

Imagine instead a parent that focuses on the process.  Her child wants to learn how to play the piano.  She encourages him to do that and pays for him to have piano lessons.  He hates the music that the piano teacher has given him to practice, so his mom goes to the music store with him to find music books on his level with songs he wants to play.  She enjoys listening to his progress and comments frequently on his hard work.  She says that as long as he invests his time in music, she will support him by paying for his lessons.  The same school competition is coming up.  The child decides to participate.  He also misses several notes and does not qualify for the scholarship.  He feels embarrassed that he messed up in front of everyone, but he does not feel like a failure.  The joy for him was in the process.

I fell into the trap of outcome parenting for years.  I decided it was my job to get my child to learn everything he needed to learn in order to make sure he could be successful, get into college, and provide for himself.  Instead what I did was create so much stress in our home that he could NOT learn.  I spent hours working on colors, numbers, and letters to no avail. On bad days, I measured my own success as a parent and his success as a person by the dismal outcome of our efforts.  When I gave this all up and started focusing on the process, he started to learn by leaps and bounds.  He went from resisting all types of school work to loving certain subjects, being a voracious reader, and being on grade level in every subject.  There are still subjects that he struggles with, but he loves to learn again.  He feels good about his efforts and knows that if he wants to achieve something, he can.  He just has a different idea of what he wants to achieve than most do.

The other day, my son came in from school with a math test that had every single problem marked with a big red X and stamped with a big red 0.  Because we have learned not to focus on this type of thing, he was only a little discouraged about it.  I noticed a small red note in the bottom right of the corner that said, “You actually got every problem correct on your scrap sheet of paper.  You just transferred them into the wrong blank spot.”  I said, “Oh my goodness, you worked so hard and got every single one right.  I know that took a lot of effort, and you did practice problems all week.  Your work paid off!  You know exactly how to do these.”  He beamed.  I still have a rare day here and there when I catch myself parenting as though the outcome is the only thing that matters.  These are not good parenting days.  They are filled with fear and urgency, both of which make very bad parenting buddies.