Who is raising your child?

When you teach a child to draw a person, does she copy it exactly the way you do it? If you've ever taught a child anything, you'll know that there is a variable to what they learn. They always apply their own interpretation of what you taught them based on what they focused on, on what interested them or what they believe is within their capacity to do.

The issue of parenting is a rich topic. The information that's out there is confusing. No amount of books will prepare you for your first child. Being a parent is as organic and as instinctive as dancing to the beat of a music you've never heard before.

A set of children can produce sometimes opposite responses to the same parenting. It is no longer an issue of nature versus nurture. Science has already again and again showed us that both play a part. The genetic information interacts with the environmental influences. But how much genes and the environment plays in how a child turns out is unpredictable.

The reason is, it is the child that chooses how she grows. She is the one filtering through all the signals from within her and outside of her. She is the one choosing what to learn. I have come across both proud and distraught parents who either credit or blame themselves for their child's achievements or heartaches. I tell them that they are not puppet masters and their children have their own minds. I once met a proud mother who was crushed to find out her fine son is philandering. She was so used to taking credit for her son's achievements that she did not know what to do when she found out that her son is not perfect. I calmly told her that her son's choices made her son who he is. She took what I said well thinking that I was only referring to his son's bad choices. In truth, what I meant was, both his beautiful and ugly qualities are to his and his credit alone. Average parents sometimes produce that most bewildering geniuses like Albert Einstein and Mozart. Einstein did not speak until he was four, was spacey in school and then one day looked at the train and formulated the theory of relativity. Mozart was the son of a businessman who traded in music. At five, the young Mozart composed what we now know as "Twinkle, twinkle little star." He is not the only son born out of a music businessman yet as far as we know, he is the only Mozart.

Sometimes what you teach children are different from what they learn. Hitler's father taught him obedience by beating him up. What he chose to learn was cruelty to the weak. Pol Pot's parents sent him to Paris to have the best education. He came home with his interpretation of Karl Marx's romantic ideas and slaughtered the educated in Cambodia, abolished the education system as a whole and led young boys to kill babies.

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting theory about success in his recent book The Outliers. The book attempts to illustrate how in simple terms, great talent boils down to lots of practice and academic excellence is an all about how old you get in at kindergarten. Though I agree with him that these are huge influences, I also know that like his premise in The Tipping Point, many factors come together to become the tapestry of the fate of the child. Only one thing however determines it--how the child chooses to respond to these influences.

A child born in January is older than her peers in kindergarten. She can skip better and most likely can button her jacket faster. She knows about six months worth of words more than her peers. Yet, what she chooses to do with that advantage is up to her. Some children use that advantage to get praises from the teacher, some use it to make a lot of friends, some children do however use it to put down the smaller children in the classroom. Some children choose to do well in math, some choose to focus on reading, some become very good with sports. The results are also as variable as they are.

The only thing we parents can control is truly how we intend to present the world to them. We can participate in what they choose to learn by choosing what to show them as well. We are the buffet of their minds. We are here to showcase what we have learned like a table filled with food, and one by one, they pick what they like to learn adding their own spices to them.

In truth, it is the child that raises herself. She is the one choosing the direction of her growth. Like a tree growing from a mysterious seed, you cannot choose a child's physical, mental and emotional shape. Only the tree knows how its branches will unfold, when it will shed its leaves in the fall; and in spring, how many flowers will blossom from it.