What's your important goal of rearing a child?

Did you ever think of what are your goals in rearing a kid? I just read about this and it strikes me. "One of the important goals as parents is to help our children separate from us, to help them become independent individuals who will one day be able to function on their own without us.We're urged not to think of our children as little carbon copies of us or extensions of ourselves, but as unique human beings with different taste, different feelings, different desires, different dream." I has never came accross  this goal but it makes a lot of sense to me after reading it. Most of the time, we always wanted to protect our kids, to offer them the best we could, to help them out when they have problems and so on. I think it is not wrong to do so, but just don't overdo it. I saw many parents still spoon feed their children who are 5 years old and above. The reason why they do so is because either the kids will mess up the place or it is going to be slow and they might be late for school. We should always try to strike for a balance in our life, espcially when come to rearing a child. We may think that what we are doing now is to help them out, but did we really think that these acts of us could harm them in the future?