By Michael Cohen
If you’re a parent, you’ve heard it: Don’t live vicariously through your children. It’s said so often it feels like common sense. Teachers repeat it. Therapists caution it. Parenting books shout it in bold type. The “good” parent, we’re told, folds up their own ambitions and lets the child “find themselves.” Anything else would be selfish. Immature. Maybe pathological.
The cliché, to be fair, warns against even worse cliches: the mediocre pianist dad forcing his kid through endless scales, or the soccer mom trying to wring a World Cup out of her ten-year-old. Nobody wants to become that.
But this mantra doesn’t just guard against unhealthy projection that goes too far, it can be taken too far itself. If fear of projection casts suspicion on any degree of continuity between parent and child, that’s where it loses me.
I should say this clearly: I never pushed my children hard at school. I didn’t map their careers or tell them what to be; they made their own choices. Nevertheless, when the achievements came, I was proud. And when people congratulated me but added the inevitable warning — “You’re not living vicariously through him, right?” — that stuck. It didn’t sound like advice, it sounded like dogma.
