Parenting Simplified
Four thousand six hundred thirty. That’s the number of matches that came up when I searched “parenting” on the Chapters online site. A few titles: Healthy Sleep Habits/ Happy Child, Connected Parenting, and Keys to Parenting Your Anxious Child.
I can give parents the first key to parenting their anxious child right now: your kids are picking up on your parenting anxiety. Lay off the parenting books.
The first step toward wresting parenting from the clutches of pop psychology and reclaiming it as a common sense part of family life is to identify two basic lessons parents need to teach their children. Effective parents, those who raise children to be confident, resourceful, self-regulating adults, teach their children two things: 1. You are loved unconditionally and 2. You can’t always get what you want. That’s it. Everything else is elaboration.
You are loved unconditionally. Some children are loved unconditionally and some are not; it’s entirely up to the parents. Unconditional love, “love given to another person without expecting anything in return,” to use the words of author David Kuhl, is not a new concept but it is rare in human relationships because we usually expect a return from our emotional and financial investment in the life of another person. In societies where the family is the basic economic unit children are valued for their contribution to family income. That doesn’t mean that parents in such societies cannot love their children unconditionally but when a child is primarily a family asset it is difficult to distinguish a child’s innate human value from its economic value. In societies that have moved beyond a family based economy, valuing children’s earning power has often been replaced by judging their worth according to achievements which bring honour to the family and reflect well on the parents, an approach which engenders anxious striving rather than confidence and self-control. Confidence is nurtured by unconditional love and children will need it to learn the second lesson.
You can’t always get what you want. This law of life, as universal and immutable as gravity, is not invented by parents to exercise control over their children. It is a statement of truth and any child raised to think otherwise is poorly prepared to deal with life’s challenges. Yet many parents dedicate themselves to shielding their children from problems and discomfort to the detriment of their growth. Hyper Parents & Coddled Kids, a documentary that aired on CBC in February, takes a look at over protective parenting and notes, “there are indications that all of the attention parents bestow on their children may not have the outcome they had hoped for. In fact, it appears to be having the opposite effect. As the first batch of hyper-parented kids (Generation Y) emerges into adulthood, they do not seem to be quite ready for the real world. University psychologists report today’s students experience higher levels of anxiety than any generation before them. And employers are pulling their hair out as Gen Y employees show up at work with an unprecedented sense of entitlement – ‘Paying your dues’ is not part of their vernacular. They require a lot of supervision and they challenge everything from dress code to office hierarchy.”
Loving parents let their children deal with challenges that are within their competence even if the child at first experiences failure. It takes a discerning parent to identify problems a child is ready to face. Infants need to be fed when hungry, changed when soiled and cuddled as much as possible. They need to be settled by swaddling, gentle rocking, or a lullaby. Babies’ first challenges arise from learning they are not the centre of the universe but members of a pre-existing community, their family, with traditions and values that provide a framework for their growth. You can’t always get what you want starts with sleeping and eating.
Falling asleep is the first task that is the child’s and hers alone; no parent can fall asleep for his child. Parents are responsible for encouraging exercise to induce healthy fatigue and providing a warm comfortable place to sleep along with a structured and comforting bedtime routine. Parents help their child learn that they can master their go-to-sleep task by expressing complete confidence that he can handle it and then giving him time and space to go to sleep on his own.
Unless force-fed like foie gras geese, eating is the child’s responsibility. Nobody can swallow for her. Parents are responsible for preparing nutritious food and establishing mealtime routines that build a reassuring framework for the child’s emerging self-confidence. Once the family has been called together for the meal and the food placed before the children the parents have done their duty and can concentrate on enjoying their own meals, providing help with spoon skills as required. What and how much the child eats is up to her. If she chooses not to eat she will be hungry. Life’s like that. If she does not eat at mealtime and asks for a snack later on it’s time to remind her that her parents have lives. Parents are not short-order cooks and snacks are treats that supplement regular meals.
Jack Toronto’s two lessons that parents must teach and children must learn form the basis for all parenting practices but elaborating them all would fill a book or two. Perhaps I should write those books and sell them to anxious parents.
jacktoronto@telus.net
