Thoughts About Parenting

Are you, yourself, a father or mother?  God bless your heart!  Honestly, having children is, at once, the biggest blessing one can have and the hardest/most heart-wrenching experience you’ll ever know.  Someone (a parent, for certain) once said that having children was like having your heart walking around outside of your body.  For certain.

Your child feels pain, you feel the pain. Your child cries, you cry. Your child is happy, you’re on top of the world.  The more children you have, the more rides your emotional carnival has.  Mine is a 3 ride carnie, but since they’re all girls, it feels more like there are 300 rides!

My husband and I were talking, recently, with other parents (a total of 700 rides between us) and I carried a few things away from the table in addition to a full stomach.

1. When you have a child who is, currently, or perpetually, on a roller coaster (whether it’s of their own design or not) - be very, very, very careful to not let their rides dominate your every conversation.  If you have other children and this one child’s name keeps coming up again and again when you talk to them, ask yourself, “How much attention am I paying to my other children and what’s going on in their life?”  You have to let them know that their life is every bit as important as any one else’s. 
2. Again, assuming that you have more than one child - be very careful of something that I see happening a lot.  Each child needs his or her own personal methods of discipline.  What works with one child simply doesn’t phase another.  Some kids will snap to attention simply by making eye contact with them and giving them the severest “I mean business” look you can muster.  Other kids respond to a heart to heart on the side of their bed.  Other kids….well, other kids are the reason God gave our vocal chords such range.  What works for one doesn’t work for another because everyone is their own beautiful individual.
3. That brings me to the next thought. Have you ever made the following mistake?  A family has, say, 4 kids.  One of the 4 gets into trouble almost every week. If there’s a wrong way to do something, he does it.  If there’s a wrong way to say something, he says it.  Frankly, the boy’s a mess!  But the other three kids are thisclose to perfect.  Sure, they may make mistakes - comes with the territory of being human - but they are what we all like to refer to as “good kids.”  For lack of a better word, the odds are on the parent’s side! Yet, the one will cast a shadow over the entire family every single time.  The parents take the heat, of course, and sadly, the other 3 are lumped with the one.  I’ve seen this happen again and again and again and it frustrates me to no end!  Even with one of the parents we were talking to - only one of their kids is currently causing gray hairs to spring up, yet again and again the father kept saying, “My kids…” when talking about how much stress he was feeling.  Makes me glad that I was an only child - for good or bad, and shadow I was in was one I had actually cast.
4. This one’s an obvious one, or should be anyway:  Don’t ever label your child.  Some people, figuratively, create little labels for their children and tape them to their foreheads.  “Difficult,”  “Spoiled,”  “Tempermental,” “Colors Outside of the Lines,” etc.  Think about how dearly you’d hate for that to be done to you.  No one wants to be identified by any of their experiences. We’re all changing and growing everyday - especially children and young adults!  If a parent slaps a “Difficult” label on a child when they’re 6 or 7 - then never removes said label, they’d better be ready to share the blame when the child hits 16 and 17 and starts to live up to the label.  If something happened in the past, it happened in the past - leave it there and move on.  Quit going back for it and bringing it into the present to throw in front of the child again and again.  Why would anyone want to put a stumbling block in front of someone they love, anyway? Very often, they aren’t the one who hasn’t gotten past it, the parent is.
5. Something I think all parents should do is to listen to their own words.  How about when we tell our kids, “If you want me to respect you, you have to earn it!” - That goes both ways.  We can’t demand our kids’ respect, we have to earn it.  How about this one, “Listen to me!” - All parents should do a heck of a lot more listening.  For one thing, when a parent is angry, the more they talk, the more likely they are to say something they’ll regret. For another, when you listen to your child, you’ll learn a lot more about them, what they’re thinking, and what’s going on around them.
6. Parents should shut the heck up about when they were their age!  No, honestly.  The world and its influences are so amazingly different these days than they were then.  No doubt, your child was raised somewhat differently as well.  Don’t expect them to be you - they have just as much of their other parent in them as they do you, after all.  For some reason, some parents want to set themselves up as the perfect ideal to their kids - then get mad when they don’t live up to it.  Personally, I can’t imagine being so full of myself as that. My husband and I have, literally, given our girls examples of the dumb things we did along with a “Don’t ever do that belive me…” tag line.  I heard my husband giving our oldest daughter advice on credit cards recently that was pulled from one of these files.  I didn’t pay attention to the discussion because it smelled more like saving money than spending it, so my interest level bottomed out.
7. When your child makes a mistake (which they will, of course), move past the mistake.  Even if it’s a big mistake - what’s done is done. Don’t let it identify the individual like a scarlet letter.  In fact, make certain that it doesn’t!  If someone walked up and pasted a label on one of my daughters that said anything less than perfect, I’d take the label off and feed it to them.  Whoa, tough moment - make that, I’d take the label off and let my husband feed it to them.  No parent should want their child labeled with a negative word or event - so it’s bumfuzzling to me that they’d ever put the label on there themselves….then have the nerve to wonder why the child refuses to change!

 This post definitely ended up being longer than I’d expected - I’m sorry about that.  I guess I had more on my mind than I thought was possible after only one cup of coffee.  One final thought - love your kids unconditionally and make sure they know that you do.  Tell them you’re proud of them and make sure they know you mean it.

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