The link between flexibility and belief in a child’s potential is made clear as college professor Tom Audet described his approach to parenting his eighteen-year-old son and fourteen-year-old daughter:
I’m a believer that you should allow the child as much latitude as you possibly can to develop to their own potential. So far that has worked out all right. [There have beenl a couple of issues where we wish they hadn’t done [something], but it hasn’t been serious, and so that’s my attitude. I tend to [give] them the leeway to manage their own issues, manage their own problems, find their own solutions, and try to grow up with experience that doesn’t harm them but they learn by.
In Toms understanding, a flexible approach to child rearing—what he calls “latitude”—is key to helping his children “develop to their own potential.” Occasionally, this strategy might result in his children’s venturing into territory beyond that which he finds acceptable; for the most part, however, latitude helps them attain a breadth of experience.
An Asian father of two, a research scientist living in St. Louis, Missouri, spoke very similarly about the connection he sees between latitude and potential: “I think. . . the main role for parents is to help guide your kids to get to the best possible potential that they have. So it’s giving them independence to do things with concerns for keeping security and safety and keeping your family values. … So within that framework kids are allowed to explore what they want to.” Erica Harper reiterated this same theme: “I am there to be a safety net for my kids, a guide, perhaps to be the voice of experience. I just think the most important thing I do as a parent is to help them discover who is the best person they can be, acknowledging their passions, their strengths.”
All these parents spoke simultaneously about a framework of loose rather than narrow constraints and about their children as having boundless potential that could be fulfilled if parents are appropriate guides. For them, children are in process, and neither their character nor their accomplishments are foreordained. Of course, parents must apply some rules as they raise these precious beings: as one father said, he feels free “to point out the path that’s a good one and to say when [he doesn’t] think that’s a good path to go down,” adding, “I think that’s part of my job to say that’s not a good direction.” But professional middle-class parents assume that latitude creates opportunities for character to develop and for potential to reveal itself. They also assume that their children will become “the best.”