On Steering
Parents, especially in their relationship with adult children, need to figure out the difference between feeling helpful and actually being helpful.
Underlying this is the — arguably understandable — parental instinct to forever crave mention in their children's milestones. You feel a sense of ownership over something you helped cultivate. The child was a project you undertook, yes; but, like with any project, there comes a point where you simply cannot be involved in it any longer if the project is to have any legs of its own.
There is a point, in the timeline of any project, where attempting to maintain control becomes attempting to enforce it; where active and direct involvement is no longer a benefit — becoming, instead, an active hinderance. This is not to say that the project will never again need your input or involvement. But it does mean you get a lot less credit for whatever the outcome is — and that's how it should be. Just like so many projects and ventures are derailed by the creator's inability to relinquish (any modicum of) control, an inability to relinquish control of your child's life will inevitably lead to disaster.
Raising a child is a bit of a misnomer; what you're raising is an adult. It is a thankless job largely because it is something you choose, selfishly, to undertake. You choose to have a child and impose the suffering of the world upon them. This suffering is inextricable from the giving of life — for the parent and the child. And the more you prolong the imposition of yourself in this equation, the more you become the root of all suffering for yourself and your child.
Even a ship is not steered purely by the captain's will. The captain must acquiesce to the forces of nature: the ocean's intrinsic unpredictability, the force of its unseen currents, and how the ship responds to this concoction. To what extent this can be predicted and streamlined is defined not by the captain's white-knuckled willpower in bearing down on the steering wheel so hard as to fight the forces of nature and attempt to emerge victorious. A fight against nature is always a futile effort at best and a recipe for disaster in almost all cases. No, what most guarantees a safe voyage is the captain's capacity to learn from experience; to draw from it and inform their capacity to account for unaccountability. That is to say, a steady ship is a product of the humility and wisdom that comes from learning how to maintain balance without having to maintain control (or, more accurately, when absolute control is nothing less than pure fantasy).
The etymology and scope of cybernetics draws precisely from this. That in a system whose output feeds directly back into the input, the system itself must be oriented well enough to sustain this jarring circumstance with efficiency. The system here is the ship; the ship, therein, is a metaphor representing parenthood: the ever-ongoing relationship between parent and child. To impose one's own will against all odds is to lead the ship to inevitable collapse.
Again, to steer is not to maintain control — to steer is to maintain balance.
This is not a consideration that applies only to parenting. This particular approach is one that applies to a broad spectrum of human venture: whether steering the maturity of one's offspring or steering a company to success, or simply steering oneself in the relationships and rapports that one cultivates with one's peers. This is the very essence of participation.
Help, therein, becomes a distinct and powerful signal in estimating the health of a system. The nature of help and how it is expressed, the capacity to understand what the bounds and constraints of that help should be in order to maximise its impact, and the capacity to recognise when one's own instinctive need to 'feel helpful' is overshadowing one's capacity to actually be helpful — these are the anchors of efficient diagnosis. And cultivating this capacity to diagnose with restraint is crucial to the ability to realise any degree of effectiveness in the prognosis applied. A doctor does not fight the symptoms of a disease, instead they use them as signposts and buoys to guide their journey to the root of the problem. Unless the root of rot is supplanted, there can be no hope for survival; let alone gain.
In all this, it should be kept in mind that the parent raises their child as much as the child raises the parent. That is to say, just as much as it is the responsibility of the parent to become aware and to grow and adapt to the changing conditions and climates of their child's life, it is also the responsibility of the child to signal clearly where the bounds of contribution overstep into the destructive blight of control.
The child's duty to the parent is the child's duty to themselves. As the ship creaks against misguided attempts to overpower the natural force of its environment, and misdiagnosed symptoms intensify or tessellate into a palette of greater concerns, the child must respond to overreach in no uncertain terms. The parent does not, cannot, see life through the eyes of the child. Therefore, the child's voice must serve as the parent's ears — signalling a veering off course, to ensure the integrity of the ship and safe passage unto the destination.
Any culture able to facilitate this, able to recognise and implement this cybernetic foundation and approach to maintaining authority and ceding control, is one well positioned to cultivate an outcome prone to balance rather than one prone to disease at every level, and every instance, of its social composition. So, balance, as charity, truly begins at home; albeit, that home reflects the balance of its residence.
God bless the genius who can figure this shit out; and god help those yet mired in the blind pursuit of feeling helpful.