Having kids – huge responsibility?

Are they happy?  Do they have a good bunch of friends?  Are they doing okay in their studies?  Are they happy?  Do they have direction, motivation, hope?   Are they eating well enough?  Sleeping fine?  In good health?  Are they well liked?  Are they happy?

Having children can seem like such a huge responsibility sometimes.

We live in times when we parents expect a great deal of ourselves.  We understand the powerful influence that good parenting can provide, whilst not always being sure what constitutes good parenting exactly.  We can be confused and overwhelmed by all the conflicting books and theories out there – telling us to play Mozart to the baby in the womb, sign to them as soon as they’re out, sleep them in the bed, beside the bed, in the other room, feed on demand, breastfeed for six months, a year, until they wean themselves, teach them to read young, wait until they are seven, take up a sport, a musical instrument, a foreign language, talk openly about the facts of life, wait until they ask, let the school cover it, allow them a sip of our drink at a party, a drink with family at a meal, ban all alcohol, leave home at 18, at 21, whenever they feel ready…

Not only do many parents put pressure on themselves to get it right, like there is some sort of right that we could ‘get’, but culturally there are great expectations on parents to provide more for our children.  More quality time, more after-school activities, more tutoring, more toys, more nourishing food, more, more, more.  Many drive themselves hard (and their children) out of fear that their child might miss out or fall behind.

It can all seem a bit confusing at times.  We live in a culture where parents are expected to focus on providing the best for their children whilst often needing to work many hours away from their children to be able to afford this ‘best’.

Often parents feel the necessity to work for many hours outside the home, leaving others to raise the kids.  Day care for the few-month olds, nursery for the babies and toddlers, school for the children – many of our children are in the hands of others for huge chunks for their waking hours.  We expect those carers and teachers to nurture and nourish and mediate and socialise them.

Culturally we have slipped into a belief that children can be moulded and adapted, tended and taught, to become the acceptable adults that we wish them to be.  Some would even go further to say that parents and teachers must mould and teach children to become decent adults.  The underlying assumption being that they are not decent human beings yet and neither will they become so if left to their own devices.

We adults are guilty of a huge disrespect.  Often we are not respecting or trusting the integrity of our children’s personhood.  We behave towards our children as if they are a work in progress – our work in progress.  By attempting to take responsibility for who they are, we take away the possibility of them taking responsibility for themselves.  We send them the message: ‘You are not okay as you are, but listen to me, and I’ll show you how to become someone that is okay.’

Culturally this is expected of parents.  It is not considered normal or wise to allow our children to determine for themselves how to live or how to be.  Society does not support the idea that we could trust our children to turn out all right, without requiring lots of input from us adults.  Children do not grow up trusting themselves because we don’t trust them.  This is damaging to children and places them at risk.  We are raising children who do not trust their intuition, do not know their own mind, do not know how to make healthy and wise choices.  How many adults are striving to learn how to trust their intuition, know their own mind, and make healthy and wise choices?

I am not advocating a parenting-style that lacks loving involvement.  And I do not think children actually like overly permissive parenting; or to be burdened by too much choice or too much responsibility for their overall well-being.  I believe children do well when we have high expectations – expecting honest, age-appropriate responsible behaviour from them.  And especially when we are able to model this rather than merely prescribing it.

How would life be different in your home if you trusted more in your child’s internal wisdom and an innate desire to be the person that they are?

Posted on 14 May 2012
Musings: Parenting girls, Parenting teenagers
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When Does a Girl become a Woman?

Is it the make-up and shoes? Or the tampax in her bag?  Is it the lover?  Or moving out of home?  Holding her baby?  Or perhaps it’s the bank account in her name with money she has earned in it?

Is it knowing how to walk like a woman?  Or graduating from college?  Is it being able to buy condoms without being embarrassed?  Or knowing when to say “No!”?  Is it looking in the mirror and loving what she sees?  Or being able to give her heart to someone, and then cope when that someone leaves?  Is it when she no longer expects to be treated like a princess?  Is it when she can hold her drink, or when she knows when to stop?  Or perhaps when she knows what it means to put the needs of someone she loves before herself, not to please or gain love, but just because she wants to?

 

Which of these would you say defines a woman? 

What have I missed?

 

Of course, there is no single defining moment, but many women remember some event which made them realise that they had taken another important step towards womanhood.

My concern is that we no longer provide our children with clear markers to indicate that they are progressing along their path towards adulthood. Every teenage girl longs for affirmation that she is on her way towards becoming a woman. Teenager girls often don the clothes, make-up, and mannerisms of a women mistakenly believing that this makes her so. Appearance is such a small part of what it means to be a women, but who is there to teach our daughters this?

We can be. We can spend time with our girls, in the company of other women, doing things that you enjoy together. We can talk about what it was like for us, growing up through our teenage years. We can tell them our stories. We can remember aloud important events that for us marked our progress towards adulthood. We can allow them to overhear and join our conversations, woman to woman.

This way she will learn what it is to be a woman.

Posted on 8 May 2012
Musings: Coming of age, Parenting teenagers, Rites of passage
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Maiden, mother, crone

Yesterday, after a discussion group on Dying Well (because I want to, and our baby did), I found myself in our local cafe with three older women.  Just as we began to share our thoughts on the morning’s group, ordering our lattes and teas, one of the women suddenly waved the waitress over with great urgency for some water. Her face was pink and glistening and she seemed bothered.

“Hot flush?” one of the other women asked sympathetically.

“Yes, a real strong surge,” she replied.

I felt awkward – these women belonged to a club that I was not a part of, but would one day join.

Rather shyly I asked, “What does it feel like?”

And then I had the most amazing experience: each of the women shared what hot flushes felt like for them.  Prompted by my tentative questions, they then talked about their experience of menopause.  The stories they told of the transformative effect that menopause had in their lives made it suddenly sound very appealing – and I’d been rather dreading the loss of my reassuring cycle, the mood swings, the sleeplessness, and hot flushes.

I felt like a little girl being held in my mothers arms. What a gift of encouragement and deeper understanding that those three women gave to me as I approach this next transition.  How I would love to have more of this kind of midwifing into the next stage of my life.

With this precious experience of having the way ahead illuminated by three older women, now I am even more committed to enabling this to happen for our teenage girls everywhere.

“Each woman reach one, each woman teach one.”

Next month, in my current girls’ Journeying Together™ group I shall be covering First Blood with them.  A week later we shall invite all their mothers to join us for the girls to hear a diverse range of women talk of their experience of first blood and how their monthly cycle is now.  I know that many prepubescent girls are ambivalent about starting their monthly cycle – somewhat daunted by some aspects of what they hear, as well as eagerly awaiting that sign of growing up that it provides.  I remember some of those feelings from that distant time in my life – but I was put in touch with it all the more acutely whilst sitting at the feet of these three wise women.

At every stage of life, those older than us have so much to offer.  I honour my elders.

And I am a little more excited about becoming a crone myself.

Posted on 4 May 2012
Musings: Coming of age, Parenting teenagers, Rites of passage
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Teen Screen Time

This week is Screen Free Week for some around the world.  So much has been written about the benefits of being computer literate and even more has been written about the harmful effects for our children of too much gaming, texting, social media, streaming and surfing.

I find myself rather more in favour of the big outdoors as entertainment for my children, rather than the big screen, but then some of my best play times as a child are scented with the smell of fresh-cut grass.

What I dislike about screens is that it turns me into the ‘screen police’ in my own home and that puts tension into good relationships with our children.  Over the years we’ve come up with some ingenious ways of alleviating screen-time-tension, but as so often happens with children, you devise a solution to a problem, you implement it and it works, for a while, but then the children change, and the problem changes, and you need a new solution.  When our teenager was little it was easy, we barely had any screen time and toys provided an easy diversion.  As the children grew older, we parents grew slacker (there’s nothing like the zeal of first-time new parents) and anyway more screen time was appropriate.  When it grew too much we scaled it back to a maximum of an hour a day, and although there were half-hearted complaints, these were forgotten at the pull of the toy box or the garden.  As the pressure of ‘what other children do’ lent weight to their complaints we brought in a new system of earning screen time – an hour of homework earned an hour of screen time.  This self-regulated things beautifully for quite a while.  But as the teen years approached, so grew the cries of “It’s not fair – other kids can watch as much as they like.”

We were faced with a quandary: what is best for our children, to fit in and feel normal, or to be made to live healthier?  Neither seemed right, so we try to find a balance between the two.

We instigated screen-Sundays – an act of brilliance as it gives us a lie-in once a week, and the children can watch as much as they please.  This seems to satisfy the younger ones and there is little screening during the week.  With our teenager it is more complicated.  When not studying or in an organised activity or hanging out with friends, the ability and desire to play seems to have evapourated to be replaced by an urgent need to Facebook, game, or watch telly.  They’re all doing it.  The challenge of the teen years is they want to determine for themselves their screen use, just at the same time as wanting to use screens more.  Somehow the parental pep talk about ‘wasting your life’ just doesn’t cut it any longer.  We’re just trying a new approach: no screens until all work and homework for the next day is done.  It has cut out those late night/early morning homework scrambles.  But I still feel that too much time is spent with angry birds, or capturing villages in Grepolis, or exchanging emoticons on social media.

I love what happens with the internet is down – the kids disappear off into the woods returning muddy and energised. I never see them energised by screen time.

In the homes across the land, what to do about all the hours spent on XBox and YouTube?  It is not all bad, but too much of it is.  Besides, the tussles over screen time do little for family harmony.  Then of course, what behaviour am I modeling?  In my spare time I like to write, on my laptop, a screen…

So, here is what I am learning – learning slowly, because some part of my brain still thinks that announcing “too much screening” to a room of faces lit by the glow of some screen or another will be all it takes for them to log off – Rather than focus on what I don’t want, I’m focussing on what I do.  I have discovered that if we have our meals outside, we will often linger in the garden whilst the children loll about in the grass or disappear up trees.  My teenager likes being read to.  Our middle child wants help with constructing a kit.  Our youngest wants to sort through her jewelry box and hair accessories. When I give time to each child, they will often carry on with that activity after I must leave them for the cooking pot or the paperwork mountain – or in this case to my screen to write this!

 

 

Photo: Creative Commons by Phoenix Wolf-Ray
Posted on 2 May 2012
Musings: Parenting teenagers
Tags: , , , , , , ,

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May Day Today!

 

For many centuries May Day has been a day of celebration – a day to celebrate fertility, a day to celebrate our maidens.  In the northern hemisphere it signals the ending of the cold, dark, harsh and infertile period of the year and the beginning of the lush, green, fertile spring.

Morris dancers don their bells and sticks and welcome in the dawn. The dew is washed over face and body to ensure lasting youthfulness. Flower-bedecked maidens dance around the May pole and May Queens are crowned. Bonfires are lit, and animals are driven between them and people leap over them to invite fertility.  The fires cast a flickering light into the night as revelers drink and dance and make mischief.  Couples go ‘A-Maying’, staying out all night gathering flowering hawthorne, watching the sun rise, and making love in the woods ‘a greenwood marriage’.

So, watch out for your daughters today.  It is their time!

Photo: Creative Commons by Andy Vernon
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Posted on 1 May 2012
Musings: Parenting girls, Parenting teenagers
Tags: , , ,

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