With parents determining both the genetics and a significant part of any human’s environment, it is fascinating that humans go around procreating without much thought to where on a vast spectrum the humans that they create will be. From those who drive hatred and genocide to those who dedicate their lives to making the world better for everyone, a large part of the outcome is determined by the parents. How then should we think about the prerequisites for parenting, before and during the journey of parenting? And, specifically, what is the scope of control we have? Today is about understanding that scope.

Read through from start to finish, but if you spot a segment listed in the Contents of specific interest, simply jump to it.

If you find it useful, please share this with your family and friends. All the other 160+ articles are here.

If you would like detailed guidance to discreetly upgrade your life – health and wealth – visit the mentoring page or the coaching conversation page.

(NEW!) For some testimonials from around the world, go here.

Contents

Background & Motivation
Scope
Timeline
Realities and Illusions of Control
The 2 Levers are long and connected
Growing and Using Your Wealth
Primary Wealth Measure
Next Level Wealth Measures
Key Investment Instrument
Resource Utilization
1234Before their Birth
1234After their Birth
Wise Utilization of Resources
Parting Message

---

Background & Motivation [top]

Prevention is better than cure and failing to prepare is preparing to fail. With that in mind, seeing how many adults are unaware of both the extent of control and the lack of control that they have over the future actions of, and outcomes for, their children, I thought it would be good to write about this topic today.

On the one hand, for parents who feel, “Our resources are limited, we cannot produce children who will become amazing adults” this note today should be encouraging.

On the other hand, parents who think, “We’re making enough money, so our kids are going to be on a good path” will receive a warning as they read through.

Scope [top]

With any complex problem it is good to, first, understand the size of the problem and, appreciate the boundary lines that we must work within to solve it. Today’s article is about thinking through the scope of control you have, and over various time horizons and stages of life. It is not about detailed parenting advice for specific problems. For that see this.

Timeline [top]

Notwithstanding unfortunate events like the death of a child, the typical parenting project typically lasts about 20 years. Your ability to drive the path your child’s life follows, as they go through a long list of stages from fetus to elderly person, is time-varying and more multidimensional than most of us appreciate. And that is about the child’s stages of life. Your own ability to impact them starts long before sperm and egg make contact.

Realities and Illusions of Control [top]

A central pillar of practical wisdom is the appreciation of what is under our control and what is not. As you read through the rest of this article, pay attention to 2 genres – [A] what you incorrectly thought was under your control but is not and [B] what you did not realize you could influence but can. You might find that the latter is quite vast. What you can influence is significant, but along with that exciting realization comes the sense of responsibility that not thinking carefully about our actions might lead to less-than-optimal outcomes for our children and grandchildren! Not thinking about a problem does not make the problem go away.

The 2 Levers are long and connected [top]

The 2 levers that still get debated a lot are nature (genes) and nurture (environment/lifestyle). Today we know that there is, in fact, an interaction between these. For instance, start off with 2 females, one attractive thanks to attractive parents, one unattractive for similar reasons. The attractive female might find it easier to pair up with a male with superior resources that could nurture her to continue being attractive and reproductively healthier for longer. The unattractive female might end up with a male who struggles with limited resources and she might, therefore, have poor health, including poor reproductive health, relatively sooner.

That example was relatively long-term. On a shorter horizon, a man who had skinny parents but is himself obese because of lifestyle only at the time of impregnating a female will increase the likelihood that their child will be overweight. And, over the longer term, it also increases the likelihood that the child will become an overweight adult even if the father does not live with the child!

So, there are two parts and you must try to influence both of them favourably. Amazing genes, but poorly nurtured might amount to not much for your child. Average genes but with excellent nurturing – your child might do wonders for themselves and others around them.

The timeline we have an impact over starts earlier than we realize and goes on for longer than we think. Let us consider the mother first and then the father. You are one of them, but what I say about the other is also of importance to you, so please pay attention – because they are your reproductive as well as child-nurturing mate.

Epigenetic changes i.e., changes that occur outside the genome and impact the expression of genes are happening all the time based on the signals they receive from the environment. If you are sitting in a comfortable place after a big meal and reading this, the combination of genes being turned on and off are going to be very different from the combination that get turned on and off if you are walking uphill in hot sunny weather and reading this on your way to breakfast after a long overnight fast. In terms of scope, realize that your behaviour today impacts your unborn child who has not even been conceived yet, and correspondingly your future grandchild too!

As the mother, even before your daughter is born, she has the eggs inside her that will potentially give you grandchildren. Your health status during pregnancy, including the excess fat you have relative to what is ideal pregnancy fat, impacts, not just the daughter you will have, but also the grandchildren that you have through her. This is because the environment in your womb plays a stronger part in your child’s health for certain future health measures (e.g. obesity) than your DNA does. If you are pregnant with your daughter, you are already carrying and influencing throughout your pregnancy, the eggs that will later give rise to your grandson or granddaughter. So, pay attention to the fact that the type of son you have and the kind of grandchildren he will produce is driven by the lifestyle you had before pregnancy, during pregnancy and after he, your son, was born.

As the father, you are forgiven if you thought that your impact through DNA is only limited to a few minutes of action relevant to ejaculation. Most people, including wannabe parents, implicitly believe, “Oh, all the father can contribute in terms of genetics is to just pass on the sperm – his ability to change the impact he has on the child’s DNA is limited.” However, your lifestyle for many years before impregnating someone has a direct impact by being able to change the genetic material being passed on through that one sperm cell that hits the jackpot, the egg, and can fuse with it.

Whether you are male (M) or female (F), you are going to be passing on your DNA, along with genetic mutations that have been created during your lifetime. You cannot control what genes (along with mutations) were passed down to you by your parents but you can significantly influence what genes you pass on to your children. This allows you to have control in multiple ways at the pre-birth stage. First, (M+F) you can mate with a person with good genes. Second, if (M+F) you are already sharing a life together, you can encourage them to have a lifestyle that ensures that the beneficial genes from their side are expressed and the detrimental genes are suppressed. Third, (M+F) you can improve your own lifestyle further to influence the quality of the genetic material that you pass before the pregnancy. Fourth, during the pregnancy, you (F) as the mother (or surrogate) can directly influence the environment in your womb to have better epigenetic changes. And you (M) as the father can influence it indirectly.

A key takeaway from this section – your impact on your child’s genes starts long before you consider having a child and extends beyond their generation.

Growing and Using Your Wealth [top]

The simplest representation of wealth growth is

        Wealth_later = Wealth_now  x   (1  +  Growth_rate)

If you do not have Wealth_now, it will grow to… zero!

If your Wealth_now is negative, you will be in a larger deficit later!

So it follows quite logically that the 2 actions for controlling the relevant variables are:

– be in a position where you do have a decent amount of Wealth_now

– master the methods for having a Growth_rate that is positive rather than negative

But what do we mean by “wealth” here?

Primary Wealth Measure [top]

Just like you ought to be focused on your internal wealth and use your external wealth to increase your internal wealth, the same holds true for your children.

Leaving your children a lot of money in the bank, but with very little contribution to their internal wealth is not just extremely common today but also downright foolish. Of the 4 forms of internal wealth, it is your spiritual health that is most important. If you have been blind to the fact that what matters ultimately is your spiritual wealth, it is not too late to focus on increasing it, not just for yourself but for your child too. Warning: I do not mean religious practice. Although you could use religious practices as a tool for increasing your spiritual wealth, it does not automatically follow that religious (or non-religious) rituals will increase your spiritual wealth. Your religion must serve your soul, not the other way around. You are not meant to serve some external power, no matter how omnipotent or autocratic you have been programmed to believe it is.

Next Level Wealth Measures [top]

At a level below your spiritual wealth are your mental and emotional health. If you keep your mental health high, and your emotional wealth growing, that of your children will too. How? Because of the key investment instrument that I speak about next.

Key Investment Instrument [top]

Consider 2 natural phenomena:

1. Children are more likely to do what they see you do, not what you tell them to do.
2. For evolutionary reasons, we tend to be outwardly observant and tend not to observe our own behaviour

The resultant combination of these 2 phenomena is the fact that we automatically tend to miss out on the key instrument for guiding our children onto better paths – our own behaviour.

Hence, the scope of your actions on the future of your child ought to be clear to you. And, so whenever your child can see you – you should behave in a manner that you would like them to emulate and never act in a manner that you would like them to not copy.

Simple example – if you return home in time to play with them at an age when they will remember it later too, then it is highly likely they will do the same with the children that they have many years later.

On the other hand, if you follow your parents’ religious rituals mindlessly, without intellectual understanding, do not be surprised if your child refuses to do the same. The next generation can be smart that way 😉

Resource Utilization [top]

The only resource you have, and it is non-renewable, is your time. Let us look at 2 stages, pre- and post-birth.

Before their Birth [top]

If before today you thought it was OK to throw away useful hours on pointless things because you “do not plan to have a child yet“, upon reading this you would have appreciated that you can get your house in order well before your children are being planned. Today is a good day to start that.

After their Birth [top]

I will never tire of telling genuinely interested parents that “Your child needs your time, not your money.” It is a simplification of the truth but it fascinates me that people usually do not get it. Of course, some parents dislike spending time with their own children, and so they are probably best kept away from their young ones.

You do need to have some money to nurture your child with food, protective clothing and a safe home. But given that we are on the topic of scope of control, it is important to note that “A bit of something being good does not translate into, a lot of that thing will be very good.” In fact, when it comes to money, a lot of it ends up being worse than some of it, not just for children, but for adults too.

Of your waking hours, say 17 hours, how much time are you investing daily with your child? How much are you giving away to shareholders of companies whom you will never meet just to take home money that you think your child will need?

With your time and money, you have control (and that control keeps reducing as your child gets older) over the physical environment they are exposed to and the resultant exposure to good and bad things in that environment. The scope of the environment’s impact on your child is multifactorial and powerful.

A key takeaway from this section – ask yourself, “Of the hours that my child is fresh, alert, and receptive, how many minutes do they get to see and hear me doing the things that I think they should be doing too?”

Wise Utilization of Resources [top]

You have money that comes and goes. You have time in limited supply – because time only goes. Within that time, it is up to you to do things that send appropriate signals to the design and construction of your current or future child. Those signals are at a microscopic level (DNA, pollution, micronutrients) at a macroscopic level (food, conversation, activity) and may be non-tangible (audio conversation, visible phenomena). The timescale is long, starting many years before conception for action and continuing well beyond your death for reaction.

In all of what I have said today, the elephant in the room is greedy and feeds off any inability to master The Unholy Trinity. Even for thinking about today’s topic – the scope of your control over the future of your child – your unwillingness to think through things before today’s nudge from me arose from the urge to avoid the pain of thinking, and the urge to conserve the additional energy required to think. Master yourself, train that elephant to work for you and your family.

Parting Message [top]

Today has not been about detailed advice on whether or not you should have kids, and now or later, how to conceive naturally, or how to have a healthy pregnancy and smooth childbirth. Nor have there been details about all the things that matter as your child progresses through life from infancy to old age. However, by understanding the scope of control, you can now ensure that your resources are better allocated across the decades and within each day. After that, you must focus on the details of mastering what you can control.

If everything you do is consistent with your core beliefs and desires, then a long and healthy life of joy is pretty much guaranteed to be yours. If you want to be guided in detail, you know how to reach me, and if you found this useful, please do share it with others.

Puru

Dr Purnendu Nath spends his waking hours focusing on helping individuals and organizations reach their goals, to make the world a better place. He speaks, writes and advises on topics such as finance, investment management, discipline, education, self-improvement, exercise, nutrition, health and fitness, leadership and parenting.