What's Success?

The Successful Child: What Parents Can Do to Help Kids Turn Out Well
by Martha Sears, R. N., William Sears, M. D., Elizabeth Pantley

THE FIRST OF OUR EIGHT CHILDREN was born thirty-four years ago, about the time I began pediatric training. As new parents, we wanted to do everything we could to help our child become a success in life, but we weren't sure what was most important. At the same time, as a new pediatrician, I found that parents often asked me what they could do to help their children turn out well.

To answer both these personal and professional questions, I began observing parents and children closely and recording my observations. I talked to parents about their relationship with their child, and I invited them to tell me what kinds of parenting challenges they faced and what kinds of parenting practices worked well for them. Meanwhile, at home, Martha and I had more children, learning more about parenting with each one. Many kids and many pediatric patients later, we believe we have found reliable answers to questions about how parents can help their children turn out well. We share what we've learned in this book.

How do we become who we are? This is the question I wondered about as I began my career as a parent and pediatrician. It is not an easy one to answer. Many factors influence how children turn out - heredity, nurturing, nutrition, health, schools, peers, and, of course, a bit of luck. Parents can influence some but not all of these factors. Yet it seemed to me thirty-four years ago that there must be some common threads that run through the childhoods of children who are nice to be around. What factors in these children's environment contributed to their positive outcome? How do early experiences leave their impression on a child's inner being - for better or worse - and forever influence how the child thinks and acts?

To find answers to these questions, I decided to gather information on children who turned out well. I decided to find out what their parents did. Gather enough information, I thought, and some common themes were bound to emerge. So, for more than thirty years, I've used my office as a laboratory to study the development of babies and children, particularly the development of their personalities and relationships. After parenting our eight children, ages eight to thirty-four as of this writing, and participating in approximately 150,000 observation sessions (i.e., pediatric patient visits to my office), I feel I have a handle on what parents can do to raise a successful child.

In preparation for this book, Martha, Elizabeth, and I interviewed hundreds of parents, teachers, psychologists, and parent educators - anyone who works with children - to determine what correlations they notice between how kids turned out and what their parents did. We also turned to scientific studies on the relationship between how children are nurtured and the personal qualities they develop. Reading the research has helped us analyze our observations better and has confirmed our intuition about the importance of the connection between parent and child. Information from these research studies is sprinkled throughout this book in boxes labeled “Science Says.” We even consulted the kids themselves, asking them to record what they believed about how their parents influenced their lives. Throughout the book we list these observations as “Kids Say.”

Our observations tell us that parents should not take all the credit or all the blame for the person their child becomes. Certainly, the parents we talked to were not perfect parents who turned out perfect children, nor is this book written by perfect parents of perfect children. All of us must do the best we can with the information and resources we have. I wish we had had the knowledge and experience we have now when we were raising our first child, a time when our main concern was often just getting through the day. It wasn't until our sixth child that Martha and I felt truly confident about our parenting. However, we have learned not to beat ourselves up about the things we wish we had done differently, since we did the best we could and we can't change the past. Nevertheless, we'd like to help you scale the learning curve a little more quickly than we did. It is possible to be excellent parents even with your first child.

Our first two sons are now fathers themselves, and the way they saw us parent their younger siblings, along with the relationships we've established with them over the years, has been a positive influence on the way they and their wives parent our grandchildren. I am also beginning to see “grandchildren” in my pediatric practice — children of mothers and fathers whom I cared for as infants. I always ask them what their parents did that they will and will not carry over into how they parent their own children.

Copyright © 2002 by William Sears and Martha Sears

About the Author

Martha Sears is a registered nurse, childbirth educator, and breastfeeding consultant.

William Sears, M.D., received his pediatric training at Harvard Medical School's Children's Hospital and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. He has practiced as a pediatrician for more than thirty years.

Elizabeth Pantley lives in Kirkland, Washington.