It’s Time To Rebrand Parenting as a Leadership MBA

The untapped superpowers of becoming a parent

Aug 11, 2023

In the first few years of parenting, you’ll probably learn more than you thought was possible to learn. From learning how to feed a child, to negotiating all manner of crying, to diaper changes, to safety—it’s a learning curve that’s steeper than the streets of San Francisco.

Learning isn’t always pretty. In the moment, growth can feel a lot more more like chaos or failure. But the truth is, you are gaining skills so rapidly you don’t have time to catalog your own transformation. Plus, you’re too tired to pause or think. Yet through trial and error, through sleep deprivation and tears, and through those thousands of hours of bouncing and sweating and swearing, you’re undergoing massive growth.

Here are just some of the tools and skills you learn through parenting.

Parenting is a time of deep transformation, but we don’t publicly celebrate the growth you undergo when you become a parent.

The ability to tape, glue, or MacGyver your way out of nearly anything. Yes, my child's current puffer jacket has been reinforced with duct tape.

The superbly developed, pressure-tested skill of ultra-creative negotiation. Formed from years of dealing with unreasonable, fickle, tiny human beings, you know how to coax them to eat, bribe them out the door, dangle choice ideas in front of them, and even—gasp—get them off of devices. The forced choice, the psychological incentives, the dangling bribes: you can do it all.

The ability to move and live within uncertainty. "I'm not sure when that's going to happen, sweetie. I can't tell you or promise that for you right now."

The need to be impeccable with your word, because if you make a promise to go to that amusement park tomorrow and you fail to keep that promise, YOU SHALL NOT PASS that exit on the highway ever again without hearing about it. You are forced to keep promises or you'll never let it down—eventually making you a stickler for precise language and much more cautious about making any hand-waving promises.

The ability to say no better than your last boss. Was it hard to say no before? It isn’t any more. That amusement park—NO. WE ARE NOT GOING TO THE PARK. STOP ASKING. Nope, no way, sorry kid. Now? Now you can say no to anything and everything. Don’t touch that. Stop that. Get off there. Put that down. No you cannot touch the stove. No you cannot climb on top of the car. We are not having candy for dinner.

The ability to empathize and understand so many people. "That looks like it hurts so much. You really didn't like it when your brother punched you in the face. I'm so sorry that happened to you."

The amount of stamina, resilience, and adaptability needed. So, real talk, I never realized that a 2-year old and a 4-year-old are like walking around with animated dumbbells, and that parenting was actually weighlifting, and that at the WORST times, I'd be carrying 75+ pounds of wiggly, defiant humans in both my arms while they tried to escape. When the 2-year-old dissolves in a puddle in the middle of the crosswalk and your 4-year-old is gazing at the birds, and the light changes color, you’re bending over with double backpacks on trying to scoop them up and carry them across before you all get hit by cars. Are they helpful? No.

The ability to put others before yourself. Oh you need to poop? Go ahead, I'll just cross my legs in a pee dance for the next twenty minutes. Or refer to adaptability, above, when you pee in your sink instead (I’m not telling) or you use an old coffee cup or the bathtub or … well, anything. CREATIVITY. THIS IS CREATIVITY. Yes, I bleached the sink afterwards. If you know, you know.

The skills of tending, befriending, and community building. You're going to see these parents everywhere—school, around town, after-care, and they're probably going to be in summer camp with you. You learn the range of skills required: tolerating people you dislike, making small talk on the daily, escaping the chatty ones, corralling them together for parties, kicking them out when you’re tired…

But there’s something bigger about all of these skills…

Parenting is mostly made invisible, so we don't recognize & celebrate any of this growth in public.

These are all leadership skills and CEO skills.

Everything listed above? These are also the skills that we need in leaders and CEOs.

Empathy. Patience.
Parenting expands your ability to understand other people, to weather the storm, to attend to internal and external emotional hurricanes, and it asks you to cultivate patience like none other.
Clarity. Definition. Boundaries. Saying No.
Parenting asks you to say no at least a million times. The reason it’s so hard sometimes is because it asks us to develop top-notch skills in setting boundaries, rules, and regulations for an entire family system and beyond.
Flexibility and Adaptability.
Nothing ever goes according to plan. That’s basically the job description of a CEO: make a plan, communicate it, and then herd all of these cats into the same direction towards the same goal—oh, just kidding, all the container ships in the world stopped working. GAME TIME: WHATCHA GONNA DO?
Resilience and Stamina.
Parenting asks you to steel yourself, be resilient, flexible, adaptable, clear, boundaried, and to dig into the depths of your abilities beyond what you thought possible. Parenting is more challenging than a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Jack Kornfield even said that you couldn’t hire a live-in Zen master that’s better than just trying to deal with kids. No joke.

Parenting teaches you to say no, to quit, to pivot, to resource yourself more fully, to persevere, and it demands that you create solutions in the times when you don't have the luxury of quitting or stopping. You have to learn on the job, every day, and you probably feel like you don’t know what you’re doing half the time.

“So, kids. You could not hire a live-in Zen master that was better, I tell you.” — Jack Kornfield

Parenting is mostly invisible, so this growth goes unrecognized or celebrated in public.

In Western cultures, most of parenting is made invisible. And in many cultures, mothers and caretakers are in the “private” sphere, more bound to the home, and then isolated from one another.

As a result, this type of skill-building is often invisible and unrecognized. That's why here Startup Parent, we want to remind you of all of these newly-acquired skills. Your journey in parenting is building you into the next-level leader our world needs.

Your journey in parenting is actually building you into the next-level leader our world needs.

We believe that parenting is an unrecognized leadership incubator for what the world needs next. Parenting is so much more than taking care of the kids in front of you. It's also building you into a next-level leader. It’s giving you the skills you'll need—the skills we all need—to be incredible leaders for the rest of our lives.

Over to you: What skills has parenting taught you? What life lessons, spiritual teachings, wisdom, or business savvy have you gained through all of this?

I'd love to hear what skills you're gaining in parenting.

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