Richard CrampThe 'Parenting Thing'
June 28th 2008 23:26
Have you ever had one those ‘I sound just like my parents’ moments? It happens to all of us for better or worse.
For the most part we begin our journey as parents doing the parenting thing by modelling our beliefs and actions on the way our parents parented us. This is not unreasonable, considering that we have been immersed in their parenting style for seems forever. However, the societal influences on our own children are quite different from those that influenced us when our parents were doing the parenting thing. This, together with melding of slightly different perspectives of what the parenting thing means, from within our own partnership, leads to the evolution of our own parenting style. For our kids this is probably a good thing, because the matriarch on one side of our the family would advise that "raising kids is like training wild animals" while the other ancestor would say “that child needs a smack!”.
So, when you think about it there is a degree of truth in Frank Pittman’s observations that ...
"the end product of child raising is not the child but the parent"
For parenting is one of those skills in life that: when you embark on the journey you wish that your parents had taught you a few more of the finer details; then somewhere into the journey you seem to never get it right (or so your kids will periodically remind you) so you begin to evolve new approaches; and finally when your fledglings begin to leave the nest many would call you an expert at which point the little voice inside your head says quite loudly “I am, aren’t I!”. It is quite possible that at this point that you regress to being like your parents once again, and treat your adult children as if they are forever 15 years old.
There are no absolutes when it comes down to describing what constitutes a ‘good parent’, however, I believe that a good parent is someone who is able to maintain a positive balance between two extremes on the parenting continuum. At one end are those parents who are so liberal in their approach that they don’t give a toss, while at the other are those who structure their parenting to the n-th degree - the control freaks who closet their children.
While part of being a good parent is about possessing a clear vision of the sort of adult that you want your child to grow into; parenting is, for the most part, about providing our children with the life-skills that will lead them to being effective and contributing members of the community. It is, therefore, incumbent upon each of us to not only assist our children to develop the virtues that will enable them to do so but to also model them consistently. Part of this educative role, as parents, also involves assisting our children to develop the habits of mind that will permit them to look for appropriate resolutions and courses of action to life’s conundrums and moral dilemmas when the answer is not immediately apparent, because we will not always be around to assist them in this regard.
In accepting these responsibilities we must be prepared to acknowledge the fact that our children will, right from the beginning, bring their own personalities into the equation. Therefore, underpinning this philosophy is the golden precept parenting ... to teach your child to love and how to be loved. From this starting point everything else will fall into place.
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