Once upon a time I thought - I’ll give birth to a daughter, I’ll give her the best education - best of all MIPT, she will become a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and also, I thought, she will certainly go to ballroom dancing and she will dance a lot, a lot and very beautifully... Today I understand that my daughter will be a separate, autonomous person, and not at all a continuation of me, and that my task as a mother is to create conditions and give space for the development of the child... Today , getting ready to become a mother, I am more socially active than ever, I communicate a lot, work on myself and fill my life with meaning... Often, even before the birth of a child, parents put forward superfluous demands on him, treat him with superfluous expectations - he must be very smart, very handsome, very educated For parents, a child is a kind of continuation of their family, of themselves in society. Expectations that a child can advance a family somewhere, or fears that a child can disgrace this family - these are the expectations of families where an individual person is not in fact a separate unique person, but is a representative of something else, greater. And then, additional expectations are addressed to him: it is assumed that he should not only be healthy and happy, but also, for example, be realized in those areas where his parents failed to realize themselves. Thus, psychoanalysts note that a woman’s desire to give birth to a daughter is actually a desire to correct the mistakes of her own life, a desire to have a “republished and improved” version of herself. However, it is necessary to understand and accept that you can only realize yourself directly, take some You can only reach the top yourself, you can only score your “goals” yourself. And the child’s path is precisely his path, not “ours,” even if sometimes we walk along this path, holding hands, and the child receives my support. All the child’s achievements are his personal achievements, his “goals”, these are his “goals”... Also, a child cannot fill your life with meaning if you do not see meaning in your life. “If you have no meaning in your own life, then there is no point in continuing something meaningless,” wrote one of the classics of humanistic psychotherapy, Viktor Frankl. “Life either has meaning (then it retains it regardless of whether it is long or short, whether it has a continuation or not), or it has no meaning (then it will not receive it, whether it lasts for a long, long time or continues indefinitely in posterity) . The continuation of life makes sense only if life itself is filled with meaning. Therefore, to elevate motherhood to the only meaning of a woman’s life means to cast a shadow not only on the life of a woman who does not have children, but also on the life of a woman who is a mother,” Viktor Frankl develops his thought. Thus, you can only live your own life yourself, and not in the child...And then, the main task of parents is not at all to raise a great painter, president or top manager, but to create the best conditions and provide enough space for development, provide support and set certain boundaries that ensure safety. It is also important to show the widest range of possibilities so that the child can choose his own path. And each of us has our own path - to love for some, to work for others, to build houses for others, to build relationships for others. And our, “parental” social ambitions are our ambitions, and the path of our child is his path and it is up to him to decide who he should be in life - a handyman at a construction site or a president, a housewife or a great scientist…