Kindness or Entitlement?

‘Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.’ Meaning that once you change your aspiration — when you set your sights on different results, the system you have is wrong, by definition. Because the system is designed, intentionally or not, to yield the results you got yesterday.
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~Paul Batalden and Dan Heath

QUESTION: If you trace back any frustration to their source, what system is no longer working for you?

Every morning we have a pretty standard routine, and this morning I realized that it is optimized for one thing in particular — getting the driver and the children out of the house as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Is that the best result, though?

I was bent over the dishwasher this morning when my daughter came down already yelling about the fact that I hadn’t started on her breakfast. This revealed one of the main issues with our optimization — parents doing too much of the work.

My daughter’s breakfast includes a piece of bread toasted with butter on it, and a yogurt with chocolate shavings.

This morning we were out of bread, so my husband was at the bakery getting more, and I had previously said “No, thank you” to shaving her chocolate for her yogurt.

Thus, the yelling at me. Because, of course, it would be my fault if she was late.

This morning’s drama caused me to question our system for the morning. Are we optimizing for the wrong thing? Is efficiency really the best goal?

Would we be better off and better parents, if we optimized for independence, self-sufficiency, and raising future adults?

If it’s the latter, we need to put into question the entire morning routine. We need to rework the whole system.

Despite the fact that my children each have alarm clocks, we still gently and lovingly go in and wake them up in the morning. This works well for optimization of time.
Not so well for optimization of adulthood preparation.

Now, I am thinking about all sorts of little ways in which we enable our children a lot too much, and take away from their ability to learn and grow into the responsible adults that I want them to be.

Where does kindness end, and enablement/entitlement begin?

Originally posted on Substack with comments.

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