Most people are familiar with the expression “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink”. Implicit in the idiom is the belief that just because you can give guidance – a person needing the direction is not always inclined to listen to your counsel. Such is the case with parenting.
You Can Lead A Horse To Water…
Children are a lot like the horse in the aforementioned phrase. We can give our children all the great counsel in the world but there is no guarantee that they will follow our direction. Or is there?
Maybe the horse won’t drink the water because the conditions have not been set for it to be prepared to drink the water. Comparably, perchance children don’t follow our direction because the conditions have not been set for our counsel to be received as intended.
I believe that there are at least three different ways parents should view this expression.
Horse Is Not Thirsty
What if the horse won’t drink the water because the horse is already full? Maybe someone else led the horse to water earlier. Would you want to drink more water if you were sufficiently hydrated?
Children are no different. There will be times when children will get good counsel from someone other than you. Perhaps the direction will come from the other parent, a family member, trusted friend, teacher, coach, etc. As long as our children get counsel that leads them down the path that we want them to go, does it matter who led them to or got them to drink the water?
Time for parents to put our egos aside. Either we believe “it takes a village” or we don’t.
Horse Knows You Will Bring The Water
There are times when the horse is just like Mr. Ed – smarter than you. There are even times when the horse views you as its lesser esteemed family member. In G-rated terminology the horse considers you to be the donkey – its back-end and the lowest level of the Equidae or horse family.
Similar to the horse, our children often out smart us. They know that we care so much about their well-being that our stubbornness to care for them will cause us to ignore our own needs. Parents will often do what is contrary to our own and our children’s long-term best interest – to make sure our children’s immediate wants and needs are met. There is no denying we really do start to look like a horses…
http://youtu.be/Kja9puWp1xQ
Our break our own back nature to provide for our children establishes a S.O.P. (standard operating procedure) that makes us not only look but feel more and more like the donkey. The horse knows full well that it will never have a need to go to the river to get a drink because the donkey will keep walking down to the river, loading up the buckets of water and continue carrying the water back to the comfortable confines of the horse’s barn.
Likewise, there will never be a need for our child to learn anything – to take our lead and drink, to adhere to our advice and rules, if we are not willing to let our children experience a little dehydration. In other words, we must stop giving them everything and stop doing everything for them. Let them learn to do it themselves or let them do without.
Going without something we need – that is sustenance – has an amazing effect on us all. Once we experience deprivation the first time, rarely will we allow it to happen again. Dehydration makes even the smartest, laziest horse find its own way to water.
“Deficiency leads to self-sufficiency.”
Horse Forced To Drink
Now I’m going to share a secret with you that I hope you never apply. You can actually lead a horse to water and make it drink. Regrettably though, the horse might not live. This just in, sticking the head of a horse in water that is not interested in drinking will most likely result in drowning.
For the record, only the CIA is able to get away with this type of behavior. I believe they call it waterboarding. My suspicion is that any person who made a horse drink would be in trouble with some organization or agency concerned with the treatment of animals. And I trust that it goes without saying that any parent who put their child through waterboarding would find themselves in water – hot water.
Yet, figuratively we often parent this way. We are so obsessed with making sure that our children take our lead IMMEDIATELY that we drown them. There are times when our parenting styles can be so fanatical that our actions literally engulf our children and they disappear. Like drowning a horse, we mask our children’s personality, we kill their spirit, eviscerate their independence and fade to black their once pure disposition.
If we don’t want to kill or torture our children we should not be engaging in waterboarding. Leave waterboarding to the CIA. Simply put, if we don’t want to drown our children, we are going to have to use some horse sense.
Horse Sense
If we want our horse to stay healthy and hydrated, we are going to have to use some horse sense – common sense. We are going to need to establish the conditions for the horse to be able to determine when it is thirsty, recognize the signs of dehydration and be able to get a drink when it is thirsty. The very same can be said of parenting.
Whether or not our children drink, drown or suffer from dehydration is totally up to the conditions parents establish. Most importantly, parents will have to decide whether it matters if our children consume all our guidance the moment we give it, whether our children should be continuously coddled and deprived of becoming self-sufficient or whether it is more important that our children have the directions to find their way to water in the event we are not present to lead.
What is your parenting S.O.P? Do you have a parenting S.O.P.? Describe some of the ways you apply horse sense to parenting? Share your thoughts below!