Get smart about growing up to be like your parents!

by guest blogger Lauren Wisbeski

As a teenager, you think that your parents are awful. As it turns out, they’re actually the only ones unconditionally on your side. If you don’t see that now, give it a few years and it’ll definitely hit you.

So when you imagine the person you aspire to be most like when you grow up, when you’re a teenager you’re not considering your parents. When you’re 16, you probably aspire to be Blake Lively, with her perfect image, perfect husband, and perfect career. When you’re 23, that has changed.

I’m 23, and I see more and more of my parents in myself. They created me, and it shows. And ever since I left home, I’ve embraced this. I am increasingly accepting of the idea that I am turning into an individual who combines my parents’ best – and worst – qualities. I think that there’s probably an equal amount of Dad, Mom, and Lauren in me. My existence is fully my own, but when people say I’m my father’s daughter, or my mother’s daughter, I know what they mean and I’m proud to hear it.

I’d like to tell you a little bit about my family without getting too personal here on the web. My mother is a college professor who is slightly old fashioned but very open to alternative lifestyles. My father is an architect who lives in the city and takes full advantage of the metropolitan lifestyle. They both create; my mom produces literature on Hispanic film, and my dad designs spaces previously nonexistent. I, unsurprisingly, love to exercise my mind through creative writing and sketching blueprints. I have an eye for design and a tongue for foreign languages. I also love tennis, as do my parents, as well as Latin dance music and 90’s grunge.

More important is the idea that my parents shaped my ideologies in a way that I do not plan to change. I consider myself one of the least judgmental people you will ever meet. This is because my parents taught me to be kind, empathetic, and understanding of others who are different. Visiting Manhattan every weekend during my youth, and traveling across the Western hemisphere, allowed me to see the many different ways people live. Attending college in Boston, I continued this anthropological education, and became even more open and accepting than my parents. I would not, however, have such a strong foundation of understanding without their guidance in my formative years. I consider my empathy one of my greatest attributes, and I have my parents to thank.

It’s important to be your own person, of course. It’s also important to realize that you didn’t come from nothing. You have parents that were raised a certain way and that raised you a certain way, and even if you run away from your roots you will always have a very specific background. I love that I’m becoming more like my parents. I’m lucky to have parents to look up to. I’m living my own life and not really following in their footsteps at all, but I know that every step I take traces back (and back and back and back and back) to them. It’s important to appreciate your parents because, if you’re a functioning human being once you leave for college and then once you graduate, your parents did something right. It’s not bad to have been raised by heroes.