Why Being a Clueless Parent Beats Being a Perfect One

Parenting might be the single most rewarding thing you will ever do — and, in the very same breath, the most exhausting, most thankless, occasionally soul-crushing thing you will ever do. Both. At once. Most days. Professor Lee Ho-seon has spent her career sitting across from families untangling exactly that contradiction, and she says most parents are solving the wrong problem entirely.

Here's the mistake she keeps seeing: the moment something goes wrong — a meltdown, a fight, a kid who just won't listen — we treat the child like the variable. We look at them for the answer. What's wrong with you right now? Professor Lee says that's backwards. The child isn't the variable. You are.

When things go sideways, the first place to look isn't your child's behaviour — it's your own. Not to blame yourself. Just to actually look. That one shift — from 'what's wrong with my kid' to 'what's happening in me' — changes basically everything else that follows.

The pushover parent guilt quietly creates

Almost every working parent falls into the same trap, and its name is guilt. Professor Lee says that when a parent gives a child whatever they want, whenever they want it, something shifts in the house. The child stops being the child. They become the rule maker. Not because they're manipulative — because nobody set a boundary, and kids will always fill whatever space they're given.

Here's the part that stings. Allowing unconditionally, Professor Lee says, isn't love. Love without boundaries is not love. It feels generous in the moment; it isn't the same thing. And she insists kids can sense a parent's guilt without fail, every single time, and they will make that parent pay for it. Not out of cruelty — because it works.

So she gives working parents an actual script. When your child says 'you weren't there when other moms were,' don't reach for 'I've done enough.' That's guilt talking, and guilt never wins an argument with a nine-year-old. Get specific instead: were your socks clean this morning? Did you eat supper tonight? I show up in a lot of different ways — you just don't always see them.

The best version of this story Professor Lee tells involves a father who genuinely hates crowds — packed rooms, loud noise, not even for a minute. He went to his kid's concert anyway. Professor Lee's advice: don't let him tell that story himself. Let the mum tell it. Quietly, later: 'Do you know what your dad did? He stood in that room the whole time because he knew you'd want him there. That man is the sweetest guy I know.' That's the version that lands. That's the one a child carries.

Why a 'clueless' parent beats a perfect one

Professor Lee says a perfectionist parent operates on one dangerous belief: that they themselves are basically fine. No real blind spots. And so they raise their kids entirely within the limits of what they already know — limits they don't think exist. The problem is, a child raised inside a 'perfect' parent's boundaries never gets a reason to think past them. They never outgrow their parent, because their parent never left room for that.

Compare that to what Professor Lee calls the slightly clueless parent — not as a goal, not as an insult, just as an observation about what actually works. This is the parent who, faced with a kid's question, says, 'I don't know. How do you think?' They hand the problem back. And something happens when kids get handed real problems. They become more proactive, more independent, more responsible, because they can see, concretely, that their answer mattered. Nobody swooped in and did it for them.

But she's careful here. If a parent leans on 'how do you think?' for everything, the child ends up carrying every answer alone. That's not independence anymore. That's the child quietly becoming the parent, and it costs them their childhood. As Professor Lee puts it, people are not made up of the years they lived, but the roles they lived. A kid who spends their childhood playing the role of 'the one who has to figure it out' doesn't get that time back.

Independence starts the moment you hand them the bottle

This one starts earlier than most parents expect — before your baby can even sit up on their own. Professor Lee says the first separation already happened when you cut the umbilical cord. Everything after that is just more of the same lesson, in smaller doses. A baby holding their own spoon. A toddler putting rubbish in the bin. A kid following a house rule without being told twice. Every one of those tiny acts builds confidence — not because you praised it, but because they actually did it.

She frames it in stages. Birth to about age one is about building trust. Two to three is a sense of autonomy: trying new things, even badly. Four to seven is a sense of initiative: taking the first step without waiting for permission. And here's the part that surprised me — Professor Lee says independence isn't just being able to be alone. It's also having the courage to invite someone else in, to ask for help when you actually need it. A child who can do both is more independent than a child who can only do one.

Even her example is tiny. When your baby finishes their puree, don't just clear the bowl yourself. Pick up the bowl — and pick up the baby — and show them putting the empty bowl in the sink. Let them be part of the ending, not just the eating.

Her broader point is almost uncomfortable to hear. If you actually want the best for your kid, you let them struggle. You let them sit with wanting something and not getting it right away, as much as they can genuinely handle. Because the parents who make sure their kid is never once disappointed are raising kids who, eventually, all at once, collapse.

The nagging Generation Alpha doesn't need

Professor Lee seems most passionate about this last one: nagging. She says Generation Alpha — the kids being raised right now — simply thinks differently than we did. And when we wish for them to become what we wanted to be, or to have what we always wanted and never got, we're doing something specific. We're locking them into a twentieth-century system. A system that, by her account, has already lost around ninety percent of the jobs it used to run on.

Which means — and this is the humbling part — we can't actually mentor them through what's coming. We can't hand down advice the way our parents handed it to us, because we genuinely don't know what the next twenty years look like for them.

So what can we do? Professor Lee says our job isn't to fill in the answer. It's to suggest that there's room — room for possibility — and then get out of the way. They will fill that space with their own creativity, in ways we can't predict and shouldn't try to. The phrase she wants parents saying, as often as they possibly can: 'You will always find a way. You will always make it work.' Not because you know how. Because you trust that they will.

Don't put them in the box of what you know. Let them have their own big bang in the space of creativity.

— Prof. Lee Ho-seon

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