Raising children

My wife Prisca and I have seven children. I’ve read a lot about how to raise children. In the end, I think these are the most important rules in raising children:

Learn how to never have an angry outburst. Since an angry outburst is temporary insanity, ask yourself if being temporarily insane is ever helpful for making a serious decision like what to do about your children.
Make sure your children’s other parent is in love with you, and you are in love with him or her. Of course, this takes two people willing to cooperate together. Many of us are at the point where divorce, adultery, and/or remarriage has rendered this impossible. But if you are married, you should know that the most important thing you can do for your children is have a romantic relationship with their father or mother. You’ll give your children peace and well-being and a wonderful foundation for life, and you will also be teaching them incredible lessons about how to care for other people and lead a happy and healthy life, just by example. And at least one of you will probably have a strong emotional need for family commitment, so in order to actually be in love, one thing you will have to do is spend time together with the children as a family. And of course, to stay in love, you will have to learn to resolve your conflicts in a way that you are both enthusiastic about, which brings me to my third rule:
Follow the Policy of Joint Agreement in all of your parenting choices. You can read all the books by all the parenting experts in the world and it will still not be as valuable as simply following this rule. Not every parenting idea works for every child, but the two people in the world who know your children best are you and your spouse. If one of you think something the other wants to do in raising the children is a bad idea, it probably is. So stick with ideas that both of you think are good – the decisions you make will be wiser, and you will avoid a host of mistakes.

That’s it. I could make lots of specific recommendations for specific situations, but I don’t think any of them would be any near as valuable as following the above three principles. If you get the above three rules right and miss everything else, I suspect your children will still turn out great by most people’s standards.