Today, and every day, try to be the adult you hope your children will become. How else will they learn what it means to be an adult? Who else will teach them?
Try to stop blaming the teachers, coaches, or the school for your child’s every challenge, difficulty, or hurdle. Blame restricts maturing, yours and theirs.
Try to stop blaming the government, the economy, or prejudice for every distress or dilemma you face, unless you think blame will be a good tool for your child to take into adulthood. If you want your children to be adults who take responsibility for their lives then show them how it’s done. Your children won’t forget your temper tantrums no matter how young they may be; and they will probably emulate them.
Demonstrate, by your own display of excellent manners, the manner in which you hope your child will navigate life and relationships. It is true, they are going to watch and learn from multiple sources, but you are their primary resource when it comes to how they will respect and treat others. Little eyes are watching.
Respect, visit, and be kind to the elderly so they know exactly how to do it when it’s your turn.
Dismiss no one; look down on no one. Young eyes and ears are absorbing how to be in the world, and we, we parents, are the primary teachers.
Blending families, smoothly and successfully, is not easy.
Each family imports its own set of norms and expectations into the new family configuration and these norms and expectations will inevitably clash. Each person, too, brings expectations into the new family quite apart from what the rest of what his or her original family brings to the party. There will also be remaining scars from the sequence of events that made blending two families possible in the first place.
Blending families calls for super-maturity from the marrying or newly married adults.
They are called to lead in such a manner that all the members of the newly constituted family’s voices are heard and opinions are respected, irrespective of age.
The adults will be wise to avoid blaming others like a former spouse or former in-laws for the inevitable difficulties that will arise.
The adults will be wise to avoid disciplining other people’s children, even if he or she is newly married to the children’s mom or dad.
The adults will be wise to avoid believing the children – no matter what they may say when wanting to please the parent – want this new family as much as the newly married adults do.
The adults will be wise to speak well of the parents who are excluded from this new blended family.
The problem with difficult childhoods in troubled families (pick your conflicts or addictions or stressors or health concerns – or a combination of several) is that children with difficult childhoods have had to dress for self-protection, and, as a lifestyle, have often had to prepare themselves for enduring domestic tensions or wars and regarded it as normal. This is how everyone lives isn’t it?
Once the child becomes an adult its difficult to shed engrained protection measures and essentials and throw off a guarded and conflictual lifestyle even if it’s no longer needed.
Carefree happy children may become carefree happy adults but it’s unlikely a stressed and anxious child will enter realms of stressfree bliss and trusting vulnerability on coming of age.
Adult survivors of difficult childhoods hear things like, “You’re so difficult to get to know,” and “You’re so difficult to get close to,” and “Why does everything have to be a fight?” and proceed with the hard work of adult life that mirrors the hard work of childhood wondering what on earth people are talking about.
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Unrelated to column: got some new art in our home today: Cameroon artist Patrick Yogo Oumar (see Instagram if interested).
I expect you to tell me the truth to the same degree I have told you the truth. I do not expect you to tell me everything. I know you have parts of your life that has little or even nothing to do with me. I expect and welcome this.
I do expect you to tell me things that reasonably high functioning families consider important. If it, whatever “it” is, impacts you immediately and significantly or is likely to take me by surprise now or in the future, I want to know about it. I want to know about it as soon as possible. Of course, it goes both ways!
I expect you to offer me the same degree of freedom as I have offered you. I do not treat you like room service or 911 and I want the same respect in return.
I expect you will progressively pay your own way beginning around 16. This means you will assume all the costs related to your life as you work and earn more. I hope you will continue to apply the same aptitude to creating your great future as you have to creating your great success at school. While I will always be proud of your successes, they will always be yours, not mine.
I expect you to write well, read well, and communicate well.
It’s easy to knock so-called helicopter parents – the ever-present, ever-serving, ever advocating parents who are perpetually running interference with schools and coaches, often in ways that can be stifling, even damaging the very children around whom they hover.
All behavior has meaning. Parents “helicopter” their children (I’m amused that I used “helicopter” as a verb) for deep, powerful and hidden reasons, reasons often vastly beyond simple formulae or fixes.
What I do know is that it has nothing to do with the child. I’d motivate for understanding, empathy, awareness, and acceptance for the helicopter parent. Perhaps it is fear driven. Perhaps there’s a lack of trust with that lack originating long before the child was born. Perhaps the child is regarded as a lifeline to something saner, something more tolerable than the parent has ever known. Perhaps the parent has been used and discarded in the past and is dead set on safeguarding the child so history will not be repeated. Perhaps the marriage is perched precariously on hopes of the child’s success.
There are reasons to fear, lack trust, to want a life more powerful and meaningful than the parent may have known.
Empathy, awareness, acceptance, and understanding may go a long way to secure the helicopter’s safe landing rather than the humor or rejection used to shoot it down.
Each of us brings to every relationships a backdrop of how we view the world, understand commitment, view, and value people, join groups, terminate friendships, love, and leave home, nurture babies, pack the dishwasher, engage in or avoid conflict, and many things too numerous to mention.
Everything about our relationships is influenced by who, where, and how we were reared – among countless other variables, including natural endowment, and deeply held dreams and desires.
From these countless sources, experiences, and codes, both known and unknown, each of us was handed a Tribal Code or our truth about how life ought to work. How life was done, how relationships were conducted, talked or not talked about, became the folklore, the “correct” or the “right” way to live.
Your formative years did what they were supposed to do: they formed (and informed) you.
They taught you what, and how, to see, think and feel. They showed you what “normal” is to your family, and your experience became your measure of how life is supposed to work.
Then, when entering relationships, be it in marriage or if you are talking with your child’s teacher – the person opposite you has his/her own, and different, tribal code. He/she has his/her own lenses through which to see the world.
Your body is more important than your brain therefore focus on your body, not your brain. Your body will get you further than your brain. Your body is bait. Use it well for a fine catch (riches, status – things you can’t get alone). Other people are more important than you. You are on Earth to serve, particularly all males.
Once a husband finds you, your greatest calling is to be a mother. If you have other ambitions you will compromise your mothering. Your only worthwhile ideas pertain to cooking, cleaning, and childcare; leave thinking about sciences, technology, and mathematics to males.
Once you are in love you will give up yourself for your husband and your children. This is what love is. You are a half. When you meet a man and marry you will become whole. If you suffer in silence and allow others to use you God will reward you.
Having addressed female audiences in the USA, Southern Africa, and in three Asian countries, I perceive these covert and overt messages to girls remain consistent. Perhaps saddest is that when girls find faith, they often expect God to be the ultimate male, issuing similar messages, demands, and expectations.
The Mercury / Monday 9/25/2017 / I have witnessed many fine acts of parenting:
The mother who sends her adult sons and daughters Mother’s Day cards with handwritten lists of joyous memories about what it has been like to be their mother. She has done this for so long that it was some years before the children (when they were children) even knew they were the ones who were supposed to send her cards.
The dad who traded in his own car and settled for a used car so he could give his son the sports car his son wanted.
The parents who each worked two jobs so the two sons did not have to assume significant debt to attend university.
The single mother who has the wherewithal to leave her daughter’s academic struggles up to her and who encourages her daughter to speak up about what she needs to her teachers.
The dad who packs his son’s lunch each day for school and who adds an extra pack for his son’s friend who once expressed to the boy that he wished that he too had a dad.
The dad who taught his son to share without ever saying it but by showing it at every turn.
The parents who never let drinking distort or shape the way they reared their children.
I ask a woman how her life is going and she tells me about her children. She’s very forthcoming. I hear about their failures and successes and their disappointments and their accomplishments in sports.
So I ask again how she is enjoying her life and she tells me about her children’s teachers and how dedicated they are and how they go the extra mile for her sons and how much she appreciates it and how happy her sons are at school.
I persist and ask her if she has any close friends and how much time she spends with her peers and she tells me how her sons’ friendships are a little disappointing to her and that sometimes they get left off birthday party lists and how much it hurts her when that happens and how she wishes adults were more sensitive to her children.
I ask the same woman who happens to also be a wife how she is enjoying her husband and she tells me they “work together” as parents and they are almost always on the “same page.”
I press in and ask the woman if she has a life outside of being a mom and she gives me that blank look as if I have no idea what I am talking about.
When it comes to my sons, I remind myself of these things:
Their lives are larger at their ages than mine was at their ages. Of course, they’re starting late and the world is a very different place. Their platforms are more complex, and more dynamic than mine was and, I admit, I am somewhat limited in my ability to identify with it. This means I should not be taken aback when I am blinded to possibilities and experiences they see and want to embrace. Rejecting an idea or a possibility simply because I couldn’t envision it is a good way to widen a gap than is mine, and not theirs, to bridge.
While the world is a very different place than it was in my formative years, some things remain unchanged. Good manners, using please and thank you, looking people in the eye, standing up for adults, dealing honestly with money and time, working hard, and displaying empathy in the face of those who are suffering – are values that cannot be discarded just because the world is faster paced than it once was. One of my jobs as a parent is to encourage, even enforce some of these things if necessary.
I am enough for my sons and the only dad they will ever need.
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