Parenting Blog

"Children learn what they live."  -- Dorothy Law Nolte

Your parents, as much as they loved you, most likely followed the parenting advice of their time, which was at best impatient with human frailty.  At worst, it was punishing, sometimes brutally.  So you learned to be punitive with yourself, or at the very least, to be impatient with your needs and emotions.

What if your parents had said to you: "It's ok.  You're more than good enough the way you are... Everyone gets angry....Nobody bats 1000...Go ahead and cry....I know you're disappointed...I'll take care of you...I'll always love you no matter what....Let's find ways to help you feel better....Don't worry....Tomorrow things will be better...Together we'll figure this out....You can't always have everything you want, but you can have something better -- Someone who loves all of you, no matter what."

You would have learned to treat yourself with love, compassion, mercy, acceptance, patience.  You would have learned that you're lovable, complete with all your feelings and desires.  That you deserve infinite tenderness. 

You still do.  Why not start now?

The most significant thing for a parent to contribute to anyone is their own connection and their own stability. An effective parent is a happy parent. An effective parent is a parent who laughs easily and often, and who doesn't take things so seriously.
-- Jerry and Esther Hicks

We all know we’re better parents when we’re happy.  But life isn’t always a bowl of cherries.  In addition to the joy, life is chock-full of pain.  All of us suffer deep losses.  All of us juggle competing demands, confront intractable problems, and strive to be the best people we can be, only to feel, too often, that we’ve fallen short. Even when things are going well, sometimes we just wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

So when you’re feeling bad, what can you do to improve your mood so you can offer your kids your best self?

1. Notice it. Don’t try to justify your bad mood, just notice it with compassion. Bringing compassionate awareness to our moods allows them to shift.
2. Hug yourself inside.  Give yourself that nurturing parent we all need.
3. Declare your willingness to feel better and let your brain know so it can kick in those endorphins: "I feel better all the time."
4. Aim to improve your mood just a little at a time.  You can’t jump from angry to happy.  But you can jump from angry to mildly grumpy, and then take the next step.
5. Start a list of easy mood-shifters that work for you.  Listing things you’re grateful for?  Five minutes to yourself basking in silence? Listening to music?  Exercising for 15 minutes? Make your list now, and post it where you can easily refer to it.

My Aha Parenting moment this week relates to the movie Coraline.  By now, you probably know that the movie is about a young girl who moves into a new house.  Her parents, both writers, work at home. They’re on deadline and too busy to pay attention to her, fill the fridge, or help her unpack and set up her room.  Bored and irritable, Coraline finds a door into a mirror world with an identical but more attentive Other Mother and Father who lavish affection on her, cook for her, and arrange dazzling entertainments. 

The only problem?  Eerily, they have buttons for eyes, and want to replace her eyes with buttons too.  In other words, be careful what you wish for, and the grass isn’t always greener.

I read the book years ago with my then eight year old and felt that it was a good, haunting, tale, but too scary for an 8 year old.  I thought the movie was brilliant, a bit less scary, although still much too frightening for preschoolers.  I appreciated that its depiction of the parents as neglectful seemed to be reminding parents not to take their children for granted.

My aha moment came when I started reading about the movie online.  One writer who works at home – and shall remain nameless -- wrote:

“While we were walking out to the car after the movie, I asked my son and daughter what they thought the movie’s message was. 'You should be thankful for what you’ve got,' my daughter said assuredly, slipping her arm around my waist.  My son agreed, saying that the Other so-called 'perfect' world was a trap, but then offered this observation: 'You’re like the first mother because you’re always working and can never play with us.' When his sister gave him a stern, chastising look, he acknowledged, 'You do nice things occasionally.'  Well, occasionally’s not too bad. When they inevitably start crabbing about me not playing with them when I’m working, or baking them cookies, I can always remind them of how things wouldn’t necessarily be better with an on-the-surface perfect Other Mother.”

I have to admit that I was stunned.  This depiction of neglectful parenting was being used to justify this mom’s being too busy for her kids?  Occasionally being nice to her kids was good enough for her?

Now, I work at home too.  I know it’s hard to juggle work with kids’ needs. I know parents have needs too, and there are no perfect parents.  And I certainly didn’t think that Coraline’s parents were the worst parents I’ve ever seen. But there’s no question that they weren’t meeting her needs. They’re too busy even to keep food in the fridge.  All of us have been there, but once you have kids, the priority you put on that changes. I know there’s no such thing as a perfect parent, but that doesn’t excuse giving our kids the message that they’re a burden to us, not worthy of our time or attention.

And yet this mom’s take on the movie, instead of seeing how she was impacting her kids and vowing to make some changes, was that her kids should be more appreciative.  In fact, her entire post was about how her kids bug her so much! She used the movie to justify her own perspective rather than understanding her kids’ needs.  

My aha?  It’s not about this mom.  She’s just expressing what our society takes for granted.  Our culture has completely twisted the parent-child relationship.  Instead of realizing that WE chose to bring our child into the world and it is our obligation to meet their physical and emotional needs, we give our kids the message that they’re too much trouble, that they get in the way of our real work.

Seems to me that if our kids have become bothersome speed bumps on the freeway of life, we need to wake up and pull off the road before we really hurt somebody.

Last Sunday The Washington Post ran a wrenching story by Gene Weingarten about parents who forget their sleeping baby or toddler is still in the car seat, park the car, and leave the baby in a locked, hot or cold car all day to die. 

My first thought, of course, was that I would never do that.  Forget about my baby?!  What's wrong with these people? But these parents were all sleep deprived and overwhelmed.  They were all doing something out of the ordinary, for instance, dropping the baby at daycare because their spouse was out of town, when it wasn't their usual routine.  So their brains went on auto-pilot and they drove to work as usual.  Rear-facing carseats and tinted glass in vans don't help.

I think I'm a terrific parent.  But I know what it's like to be sleep-deprived, and I've done plenty of dumb things on auto-pilot.  So I'm convinced that given the right conditions I, like most parents, could make this unbelievable error and leave my child to die.

But here's what I haven't seen talked about in all the outpouring of response to this story.  The conditions that create such a tragedy aren't conditions any parents should put up with, or any kids grow up in. 

That may sound harsh, given the economic constraints on families today.  But this wasn't the first sign these parents had that their lives were out of kilter.  The universe always taps you on the shoulder before it slugs you in the face.  If these parents had paid attention to those shoulder taps, they could have made appropriate changes in their lives before their children were sacrificed.

I want to be clear that I'm not blaming the parents. They're victims too, of a society that expects parents to "do it all" -- raise small children and work full-time.  Most of us do it and consider it normal, without understanding the high cost to our children.  Most of the time, we muddle through, not realizing that our toddler's tantrums or our preschooler's anxiety come directly from our way of life.  Sometimes, it's a recipe for disaster.

****************

I want to thank GC, who wrote to the Wall Street Journal Blog The Juggle with a compilation of suggestions for parents.  I'm taking the liberty of passing them on in the hopes that awareness can prevent some future tragedies. 

*Keep your purse or bag in the back seat with the baby
* Ensure that all childcare providers have up-to-date phone numbers and that they will call ALL numbers if a child doesn’t show up
* Mom check in on dad and vice versa, especially if routines are shifted on any given day
* What about setting your cell phone to beep at the time that you arrive at the workplace, and then when it beeps, you always look back to make sure the child isn’t there (or you call your partner to make sure the child is dropped off)?
* A buddy system with another mom or dad?
* Some sort of system where you turn a different radio station on — one you don’t normally listen to — when you get in the car and you need to do something different than your normal routine?
* What about sticking a sign on your chest “Baby on Board!” that you’ll have to remove when you drop off the baby? (or coworkers will alert you to the problem because they’ll see the sign).
* What about getting a reminder flag like the ones that motorcyclists use so that they don’t accidentally drive off with locks on their wheels? (http://www.lockitt.com/accessoriesreminders.htm). Stick one end on the car seat, and the other end on your door handle or somewhere like that, and make it part of the strapping-in process.
* Give a car seat alarm system as a baby-welcoming gift.

"I was driving with my three young children one warm summer evening when a woman in the convertible ahead of us stood up and waved. She was stark naked! As I was reeling from the shock, I heard my 5-year-old shout from the back seat, 'Mom, that lady isn't wearing a seat belt!” --Anonymous

Children take rules very seriously, but they don’t really know what’s normal behavior.  They learn that through experience, and their early experiences with us have the most impact.

If kids grow up in a house with lots of yelling, that becomes normal to them and they will (unconsciously) create that kind of household as adults.  If they grow up in a house where dinner can be scrambled eggs and carrots out of the bag, but everyone talks, laughs and enjoys each other, kids will prioritize connection over appearances.  And if kids grow up wearing seat belts, not using seatbelts will seem shocking to them.

The good news is that we’re the grownups now, so we get to make our own house rules.  Even better, we can choose to break the rules we learned as kids that no longer work for us.

What are the three most important rules (explicit or not) in your family?

What lessons do your kids learn from these rules about what’s important in life?

May your weekend be filled with miracles, large and small.  And don’t forget to wear your seatbelt.