What would future you want from your mom?

16 comments

1. Cooking and finance/investing (if you know). I didn’t have a dad growing up and my mom didn’t know anything about saving or investing wisely. I’ve learned to cook and clean though so I didn’t end up just eating ramen or pnut butter and jelly after I left

2. Let him take risks even if you think he’ll fail. Related to that, encourage him to try new things by himself. Instead of buying stuff for him, give him money, and let him budget for it.

3. [deleted]

4. Buy real estate often.

   ^((Edit: It would appear there are some folks here who don’t like real estate).)

5. I don’t think I would’ve wanted my mom to teach me herself, but I wish she had arranged for a trusted male friend to teach me how to talk with girls in regards to flirting and dating. I had no role model for that sort of thing and it really hampered my ability to get dates and girlfriends.

6. More time together.

7. Life skills. It doesn’t have to be from a mom necessarily. But I wish I would have learned what taxes are and how they work. What is a 401k. What do I want from my insurance. Stuff that I had to figure out with trial-and-error and google.

8. Teach him to cook and get him to sign up for a martial art. Even the best mother in the world can’t replace a good male role model and discipline.

9. Teach him that he should never ever allow an abusive person into his life – and do so by example.

10. I’m sure you are doing a wonderful job, but one of the best things you can do is to find a man you have a lot of respect for and ask if he would sit down with your son sometimes. There are just things that 16 year old me would never have asked my mom and would never have really heard from my mom.

11. Cooking, finances, and have a good medical support system (from mental health) to doctor to dentist.

12. Lots of thoughts on this

    Adding onto the discussion of allowing for failure and taking risks, I would have one more thing. If he wants certain things like say a computer or a car or even nice clothes etc. etc., I think there is another way to make that productive and constructive exercise. One philosophy of living that I don’t particularly agree with is just pampering your kids and getting them whatever they want. But I also don’t agree with the philosophy of not getting them anything. And while I do agree that there could be some value to having your kids work jobs to earn their luxuries, I don’t think that’s a universal solution for everyone since working 3 retail jobs in high school is not going to add much value/growth over 1 retail job in high school, and since such jobs take time and energy away from other passions/school itself.

    I think a third good way to deal with getting your kids stuff is to have them learn how to care for it as a condition of getting it for them.

    For example, let’s say you’re a kid wants something expensive like a computer or a car.

    The first step would be teaching them how to come up with a list of pros and cons, and this process is harder than it looks because it also requires you to think about opportunity cost. Pros and cons are more than just “these are the features and this is the price” — it also includes things like what’s the price of NOT taking this action? What’s the expected maintenance, insurance, etc?

    The next step would be Teaching them how to collect information. In the olden days of say our parental generation, seems like people made their decisions with very little information and kind of just went based off of conventional wisdom. These days, if you want to learn some thing and get real world feedback or data, you can read peoples opinions and experiences on Reddit and other forums for specialize topics. This is especially true for things like cars, technology, clothing, financial planning, etc. and teaching him how to filter the good information from the garbage.

    And the last step would be teaching him how to care and maintain his products once he has them. For example, let’s say you are getting him a car or he is getting himself a car. Have him watch some videos from AMMO NYC or Chris fix to learn about how to detail a car. To learn about how easy it is to damage the paint or the leather or the plastic, and how to prevent that and how to care for that. To teach him how to not get swirls. To teach him how to improve his driving skill so that he can prolong the life of his brakes and his suspension by not driving to a radically or by avoiding potholes etc. there are techniques and best practices for all these things. If he’s getting a computer, teach him some best practices to help him make sure that he doesn’t scratch the computer so that it retains some value if you ever wants to sell it. If he’s getting new clothes or close that he plans to keep for a long time like dress clothes, Teach him about the details of how to properly wash your clothes so that they don’t shrink, or they don’t get discolored, or that they don’t start pilling. That way not only can he do all those things himself, but he will know how to do it well and properly.

13. At 16 I wanted a mother who didn’t treat me like her second husband and dump all of her mental illness on me when my father wasn’t around. I wanted a mother who didn’t just see me as the sire of her grandchildren.

14. >and he has an abusive alcoholic for a dad.

    That’s what my mother always said about my father. I found out later he had been a good man. My mother married him because they had a good time partying. Then she drove him away. She was the shrew in my life. There is always 2 sides of every opinion.

    You CANNOT insult the father without insulting the child. Your son is 50% his father. He wants you to STOP saying criticism about his father, and help him spend more time with his father.

15. Teach him how to disagree with you.

16. Spending quality time and be a person who is willing to listen to him and support whatever he wants to do as long as he has thought properly about it.

    I can learn all these things myself but one thing I can’t learn on my own is how to be social and what to see in a lady I want to be in a serious relationship with.