It’s been almost a year since our third and last child graduated from stakes high school. Looking back, I can see now that there were some parenting mistakes we could have avoided. I share them so that you don’t have to repeat them.

I wish I had dealt with peer pressure better. During the senior year, it seems like every conversation I had at a school meeting ended up being about college. It made me anxious to see my kids’ classmates applying part of my brain kicked in with “Oh yeah? My kid has better scores than yours he could get in anywhere yours can!” I probably passed some of that stress to my kids, who didn’t need to deal with my anxieties on top of their own. Everyone has their own path. It doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing --- the only person that matters is your son or daughter.

I also worried about their social lives. It made me anxious that my kids didn’t seem to have the common teen interest in school dances or parties but preferred to have a few friends over for a movie sometimes. I can now say this: worrying about their social lives was a total waste of time and energy. I should simply have enjoyed them being at home. They saved their focus for things like Physics and History. And they are doing just fine in college.

I simply thought teenagers would go to bed when they were tired. I didn’t realize the addictive(上瘾的) power of video games or texting. My daughter slept with her phone in her bed for at least two years. If I could do it again, every kid would have been required to leave the phone in the kitchen before bed.

I’m proud to say that today we have three college students who are well-prepared young adults in spite of every parenting mistake I made in high school to delay(推迟) that.

Chinese are very generous(慷慨的) in educating their children. Not caring about the money, parents often send their children to the best schools or even abroad to England, the United States and Australia. They also want their children to take extra-course activities such as musical instrument learning or ballet (芭蕾) classes, or other classes. They think these will give them a good future. The Chinese believe that the more expensive an education is, the better it is. So parents will spend much unreasonable(不合理的) money on education. Even poor parents will buy a computer for their son or daughter.

However, what most parents fail to see is that the best early education they can give their children is usually very cheap.

Parents can see that their children are very good in some areas while poor in others. Parents also can see some children are good at these skills and others do well in others. Most parents fail to realize that today’s children lack(缺乏) self-respect and self-confidence.

The problem is that parents are only educating their children on how to take tests and how to study well, but parents are not teaching them the most important skills that they need to be confident, happy and clever.

Parents can achieve this by teaching skills like cooking, sewing(缝纫) and doing other housework. Teaching a child to cook will improve many of the skills that he will need later in life. Cooking needs patience and time. It is an enjoyable but difficult experience. A good cook always tries to improve his cooking, so he will learn to work hard and finish his job successfully. His result, a well-cooked dinner, will give him much satisfaction and lots of self-confidence.

Some old machines, such as a broken radio or TV set that you give your child to play with will make him curious(好奇心) and improve his interest. He will spend hours looking at them, trying to fix them. Your child might become an engineer when he grows up. These activities are not only teaching a child to read a book, but rather to think, to use his mind. And that is more important.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” When I was a kid, I dreaded the question. I never had a good answer. Adults always seemed terribly disappointed that I wasn’t dreaming of becoming a scientist or an astronaut.

One of my complaints about the question is that it forces kids to define (定义) themselves in terms of work. When you’re asked what you want to be when you grow up, it’s not socially acceptable to say, “A father,” or, “A mother.” This might be one of the reasons many parents say their most important value for their children is to care about others, yet their kids believe that top value is success. When we define ourselves by our jobs, our worth depends on what we achieve.

The upside of low expectations is that they erase the gap between what we want and what we get. A lot of evidence shows that instead of painting a rosy picture of a job, you’re better off going in with a realistic preview of what it’s really like. Sure, you might be less excited to take it, but on average you end up more productive.

I’m all for encouraging youngsters to aim high and dream big. But asking kids what they want to be leads them to claim a career identity they might never want to earn. So instead, invite them to think about what kind of person they want to be — and about all the different things they might want to do.