What's clear to me from these articles and studies is that there's no silver bullet - if you want to raise your child well, you have to spend a lot of energy un

What's clear to me from these articles and studies is that there's no silver bullet - if you want to raise your child well, you have to spend a lot of energy understanding your child and guide him, but from his perspective, not your own. Be firm, for his own sake, but without injecting yourself too much. It's wrong to forcefully impose your own goals and expectation borne out of your own insecurities on your children at a stage when children can make decisions on their own, but it's also wrong to be secretive, manipulative and passive-aggressive about your expectations or pretend to yourself that they don't exist. Instead be gradually open about your own feelings and expectations and why you have them and allow them to make decisions that incorporate, but aren't forced by your own desires. All of this is a hard balancing act that demands a lot of mental effort and emotional maturity, not something we can follow out of a book. The more we try to follow someone else's rules for raising a child, the less effort we spend understanding own child and/or look inside ourselves to understand what we truly need to do.