Parenting Secrets
Having children is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it could be compared with being shot out of a cannon. Initially, there is the shock of being thrown into the unknown with no turning back and no idea where you will end up. As you gain altitude you get a sense of how quickly things fly by and try to gain some perspective as you go. I am at the end of a particular arc that has followed the trajectory of my life choice to start having children when I was nineteen. That ending means the beginning of a new direction. My two sons are now grown adults, a few years ago I became a grandmother at the age of 41 and I am currently going back to college. My hope is that I can use the experiences I have had to help others who are at the beginning of this wild ride we call parenting.
Being a parent for the past 25 years has been a joyful and difficult task. I put my own education on hold for the most part and made it my priority to focus on the education of my boys. I had started studying Child Development when I was a pregnant teen. I knew that although my family had faith in me, society saw me as a statistic, unlikely to be a good parent at such a young age. I guess I felt I had something to prove. My own parents had been very young when they had me but that was not as rare in the baby boom generation. I was raised by a mother who has endless patience and a father who has both a gift for storytelling and is also a highly engaged listener. Consequently, I came into parenting with good instincts.
Parenting, for me, was an opportunity to nurture and infuse those impressionable little minds with ideas and encourage them to entertain every possibility. We left the Bay Area for the woods of the Lost Coast. I wanted their lives to be filled with creativity and the simplicity of nature. We made crafts and spent many days walking through the redwoods to the river. Money was scarce but my time for them was plentiful. When I found out there was a small alternative school in our area I abandoned the ideas about homeschooling I had been exploring (much to the relief of my parents) and enrolled my kids there. I also got a job working in their vegetarian, mostly organic, school kitchen. I was still involved in teaching my boys but they were also growing more independent and interested in the world.
At home we had no television, no computers, ipads didn’t even exist. We spent many hours at our small-town library which is hardly larger than the size of a trailer but contained countless other worlds to explore. We made meals with food from our garden and planted fruit trees. We raised ducks for their eggs (because they are so much cuter than chickens). I was idealistic about my ability to protect my children from the evils and perils of the modern world, for a while.
I am not so young and idealistic anymore. I see how children thrive on our attention and our approval and I realize that much of the rest of it is inconsequential. They are growing up in a small world of diminishing resources but full of increasingly resourceful people. They will be exposed to all kinds of media but our conversations about it are more important than trying to entirely shield them from it. As much as it pains us, they will have times when they struggle in school, either socially, academically or when they start to question authority and the banality of compulsory education. I used to think traditional schooling was just about preparing our kids for the ultimate submission to the system but that is only true if we don’t allow them to question it. If we don’t validate the seeming senselessness of things we may miss the opportunity for them to listen to us when we point out the privileges of getting an education and to encourage them to advocate for change when they see something that isn’t working.
Sometimes parents get caught up in guiding their kids when we should let them lead more. It is important to let them know we trust them and their ability to navigate the waters. Expose them to everything you love, and then be open to what they love.
When we finally got a television my oldest was ten. We had strict limits on time spent on electronics. I encouraged my kids to follow their passion but it didn’t occur to me when my older son wanted to spend endless hours on the computer that was his passion. Now he is working in San Francisco as a software engineer. My younger son is in college and passionate about electronic music. When he was a teen he convinced me to really listen to some of his favorite music because he told me about a study that showed older (i.e. less adaptable) brains are rarely open to new kinds of music. I was determined to prove my brain was not old, I listened, more than once. Believe it or not, some of it grew on me. Now he makes his own electronic music and I can’t help but love it. I am incredibly proud of who they have both become.
It is really no secret, loving our kids for who they are is how they become people who love themselves. When we try to mold them to our ideals or protect them from everything we see wrong in the world it gives the impression we don’t trust them to figure it out for themselves. Talking with them, and more importantly listening to them, is more effective than sheltering them. The greatest part of parenting is seeing who your kids turn out to be, the more they know you are going to be interested in whatever that looks like, the more confident they will be and maybe better able to handle that ride if they decide to climb into that parenting cannon.
