You are a gardener, not a carpenter
A developmental psychologist says the whole modern idea of parenting rests on a metaphor that never fit children.
Alison Gopnik points out that parenting as a goal-driven verb, something you do skillfully or badly toward a desired outcome, is barely a generation old as a cultural concept. She thinks it rests on the wrong model of what a child is.
A carpenter starts with a plan and shapes raw material to match it: right technique, right tools, predictable result. A gardener can't dictate what a plant becomes. They can only build good soil, light, and space, then watch what grows, messier and far less controllable than a finished cabinet.
Gopnik's research on how children actually learn, through play, imitation, and constant improvised experiment, argues kids are built by evolution to be unpredictable and different from their parents on purpose. That variability, she writes in The Gardener and the Carpenter, is what let humans adapt to environments no single generation could foresee.
Most parenting advice sells better carpentry. Gopnik's argument is that you were never building furniture.