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Parenting

What makes a parent? One thing: A child, in your absolute care. That child may
make you a parent when you give birth, or when you adopt – or a child may,
somehow, wander unexpectedly into your life, or be thrust on you by tragedy. A
child may become you child-by-choice, picking you to stand in for a parent
missing or in some way crippled by life. The trick is, once a child owns you,
you’re a parent.

You may have chosen that, or been waylaid by life’s unexpected detours. It makes
very little difference how the relationship occurred. There you are: You and a
child, struggling with the complicated, difficult, eternal challenges of the parenting
relationship. The question from here on will never be how you got to that point, but
what you do with your parenthood once it is been bestowed upon you.

So the question is not how to be a parent: If you have got a child, you are stuck
with the role, whether you wanted it or not. The question is how to be a good
parent – and the answers are as varied as parents and children themselves, though
some principles rule.

The truth is that most of us will fail in the challenge, in some way or to some
degree. Even the finest of parents falls short of perfection. That is not because
there are no reliable, committed, intelligent, honest, caring, responsible parents
giving superb attention to the children in their care. It is because the labor and
ideals of parenting are infinite, and those who parent are merely human and finite –
and because so much of parenting falls under the heading of “no right choices, only
a range of better and worse wrong choices.” The job is too large, the ideals too
constant, the obstacles too persistent and difficult, and the options often so limited
that the best we can hope for is to raise a healthy child who loves us, and hope
there is some kind of grace in the universe to cover all our errors.

That said, there is plenty to know, consider, and learn about good parenting.
Ancient and modern sources have plenty to say. The past offers us plenty of
unsettling versions of good parenting, there are as many or more that can
strengthen your sense of being part of a massive tradition of parents all working to
raise up good children, with love and honor on all sides.


                      The First Principle: A Parent is Forever
Whether it makes you sober, or sends you howling in terrified laughter, the bottom
line is, once a child has made you a parent, you will never stop being a parent. That
is true no matter what: Whether you put the child up for adoption, or get in a car
and run away; whether the child dies or you do. It is true when your child is little
and it will still be true when you have lost five inches in height to age, and your
“little baby” towers over you. To become a parent is to cross over an invisible
border, and enter into a country from which you can never really return.

As with most momentous border crossings, it might be best if you entered into this
new, foreign land with the knowledge of that eternal change. But in all honesty,
few parents can be said to have become parents as a result of deep, profound and
accurate meditation on the ever-expanding ripples of change that will begin when a
child enters their life. Instead, parenthood often seems to just sort of happen, and
the philosophy often gets saved until much later. Even the most thoughtful,
conscientious parent usually finds once the border has been crossed that the terrain
was not quite what they expected when they got out their visa and walked across
the barrier to the other side. It is hard to get your brain to really wrap around the
notion of “forever.”

A child does not even have to succeed in being born to carry his or her parents at
least a few feet into that unknown country. Mothers and fathers who have lost
children to miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirth, and abortion can testify that
the slight, ephemeral moments a child existed in their awareness altered who the
parents were in ways they could not have planned for.

You cannot divorce a child. Even if you give a child away in adoption, that strand
remains attached to you, a genetic and personal link to the future and to the world
around you. It remains an experience you had, a choice you made, and a
responsibility you are caught up in, for all the rest of your life.

How you will see that play out is uncertain. You may even be among the few who
never really sense the connection – leaving that awareness to your child, his
adoptive parents, and all the people who deal with him in the decades to come. But
the bond remains: Your child’s wife, looking into his face, will wonder, in passing,
if she sees his mother in his eyes, his father in the shape of his hands. Your
grandchildren, when asked, will tell people that their daddy was adopted, so they
have grandparents, but do not know what their real grandparent are like – and even
in saying so much, they will remind people of the bond to you that never broke,
and never could break.
Once you are a parent, you will never, ever again in your life be a “not-parent.”
That truth can be replayed anew for each child you have, but it can never be
destroyed from the moment you have your first child. Becoming a parent changes
your very definition.

In that, though, you are not alone. At least your utter change is known and shared
by billions, in the past and present, and will be known by more in the centuries to
come. The trick is for everyone, past, present and future, to accept the principle
from the beginning: Being a parent is forever, and like all things eternal it
deserves some time and attention, and a lot of responsible consideration.


                         To Hold the Future in Your Hands

Every living child is an arrow aimed at the future. Every child who dies is a
possibility for the future denied, mourned not only for him or herself, but for all the
tomorrows that will never happen as a result of death. When you hold a child, you
are holding the future between the palms of your hands. Every action you take with
a child is an investment that will only show results a year, a decade, or a lifetime
from now.

That being true, it is painfully easy to develop an overwhelming feeling of stage
fright thinking about the choices you are going to be making as a parent. We can
hear the sober, aggrieved voices of the adults our children will be, saying sadly,
“My mother never loved me enough,” “My father was a bad role model,” “My
parents had no idea of proper discipline.” If we are given to anxiety we worry our
children will turn out badly, and commit dire crimes because we failed to parent
them correctly. Then we think of gossip hosts on television, trotting out pictures of
our children in their grubbiest clothes, announcing the darlings grew up in neglect
and poverty. Or, if we come from academic backgrounds, we dream of our
children becoming genius writers, or painters, or actors, or statesmen – and then
we imagine the two-to-three academic texts produced yearly “proving” that these
geniuses were abused by their parents, psychologically warped by their
environments, and driven to extremes of distress by our lack of parenting skills.

My advice? Well, keep it sort of in mind, in a back corner of your consciousness.
It never hurts to know history will judge you, and that your results will be the proof
of your methods. But beyond that?
Forget about it. Let it go. It is impossible to make perfect choices for a future you
can only imagine. It is hard enough to make choices for a present that is already
right here. Focus on the child you have, in the life you are living now, and do not
wring your hands over a future that may never happen.

There is an old folk story – one of the many stories of “fools.” This one involves
the most foolish son of a family leaving his home, to make his way in the world.
His father tells him not to come home until he is found three people more foolish
than he. For some time he wanders the world, learning a bit, developing his good
sense, but he keeps failing to find anyone who he honestly thinks is sillier than he
is. Until, at last, he enters a tavern after a long day on the road.

He orders a meal and a pint of beer, and the daughter of the innkeeper runs off to
take care of that. The Fool sits at his table, waiting for his dinner, but no dinner
comes, and no beer. After a time he waves to the wife of the innkeeper, and she
arrives. He explains; she apologizes and says she will go take care of it.

Again he waits. Again he fails to get his dinner and his tall draft beer. He flags
down the innkeeper and explains once more. Is once more told he will be taken
care of – but no such luck. The innkeeper disappears, and the Fool waits, and
waits, and waits. At last he gets up to see what could possibly be wrong. He
searches the entire inn, and finds no one – not a sign of the innkeeper and his
family – until he goes down to the cellar.

There he finds all three, in tears, weeping and wailing and moaning and crying,
each still holding an empty pitcher to hold the beer they have not yet drawn. The
Fool asks what is wrong.

The daughter points to an ax lodged in a high beam above the beer cellar. She says,
“I thought you very handsome when you placed your order, and I thought if I were
lucky, you would marry me. In time we’d inherit this in from my parents, who
would retire to a little cottage in the town. We’d run the inn successfully, and be so
happy! We’d have four children and we’d make good money, and everything
would be grand until, one day, you’d come down here to draw the beer, and that ax
would come loose from the beam and kill you dead!” And she began to cry again,
louder than ever, and her parents with her. They wept and wailed and wrung their
aprons, until at last the Fool reached up, pulled the ax from the beam, and handed it
to the girl. “If you’d had even so much sense as to pull this ax free, all the good
things you dreamed of might have happened, with none of the bad. You’re a pretty
girl and this is a nice inn, and I would have been happy enough to marry you. But
never will I marry into a family of people sillier than I.”

When raising children, your chore is to remove axes you can see in the present, and
let the axes of the future fall where they may. You cannot see them, and can only
do so much to plan for them. So, take the future seriously. Realize your choices
have consequences. But let go of the anguish and the fear of history watching over
your shoulder. Concentrate on the present and the needs of the present, first.


                                      Priorities

Okay, you have accepted this is a serious commitment that will change your life,
but you have also accepted you cannot let that get to you. You are focused on the
job, and the real child who needs you. Wonderful! Now I bet you are asking,
“What next.”

It is what I would ask, anyway. At some point, the rubber has to meet the road, and
the actual child-rearing needs to begin, right? Well, mostly right. Now you have to
get used to setting priorities – and then resetting them. And setting them over and
over again with each new situation – and remember, by definition, a growing,
learning, changing child changes the situation all the time. That is a kid’s job.

To successfully keep up with shifting priorities, you have to – set priorities.

Yes. That is just what I said. You need to set priorities to set proper priorities.
Why? Because if you do not you and your child are going to be pulled apart by the
war of conflicting demands. If you need to see an example of where poor priority
stacking can end up, just go to a few parenting events and chat with the parents
there. You will quickly find at least a few whose day planners are crammed with
the 75 billion things they are tracking that absolutely must be done to raise their
children successfully: Play dates, little league, a steady stream of doctor’s
appointments, parent/teacher conferences, dance class, sleep overs, birthday parties
– those to be given and those attended. There are pageants, and clubs and weekend
activities and recreation and education and after a little while of listening to the
litany, you begin to wonder how anyone can come out of that sane. People do.
Some parents and children manage to surf the crest of the wave with ease. More
manage to take spill after spill only to clamber back on the board. But only a few
manage to stop and ask themselves what this is doing to their parenting. After all,
look at all the demands they are meeting. Look how well they are ensuring their
kids have it all.

Their kids do not “have it all.” They have a lot, and much of it will be precious to
them when they are grown. Much, however, will be remembered as a blur of
kaleidoscope changes all swirling around a single, harried parent who is teaching
only one lesson well and consistently: That if you cannot do everything, then you
are a failure.

Is this really a lesson any parent wants to bequeath to their child? That the rat race
starts in preschool and does not end until you are forcibly shuffled off the
shuffleboard at the end of life? Do you want your children believing that it is not
so much that Girl Scouts is important, or dance class, or a My Little Ponies themed
party, as that somehow you do all of it? Or would you rather your child learn
young that life is about choosing, and then valuing what you choose?

You begin to draw the line between you and rat race parenting by setting your own
priorities and standards. You decide what is vital, and what is not.

Here is a sample of priorities. Yours may and probably should be different in some
ways, and on some levels, but it is a start. But it is roughly the set that I chose, and
it will give you a sense of setting limits.

First came my child’s basic needs: Fundamental medical attention, food, water,
shelter, clothing, sleep, and an environment that meet a few basic criteria for safety
and security. Love and a basic education – these came first, and nothing was to
come between her and her true needs.

After that came the enriching stuff: Ethical upbringing aimed at teaching her some
standards of behavior. Books – as many as I could give her or convince her to read
herself, were included. Access to art tools, music, and exposure to beautiful things
– and plenty of discussion when possible. You quickly find out that it is not
possible to inflict all that much lecture on an unwilling child and you settle for
saying honestly and quickly what you do feel. That this particular book is the best
fantasy you ever read as a child or that painting is one of your favorites in the
entire world.

Oddly, these flashing comments seem to matter more than all the erudition in the
world. What matters most is to see Mom and Dad loving a great, complex world,
and interacting with it. With luck, your child may come to do the same, even if she
loves a painter you hate, and reads no fantasy at all.

After that? Attention paid to a few friends, the occasional trip, treat or party, and
you have covered what is needed. From that point on everything is not only
optional, but should be considered with great caution before being added to a
child’s life. A child can live without seven clubs, birthday parties with themed
paper plates and hired entertainment, music and dance and sports lessons all at
once, and so on and so forth. Indeed, it is hard not to suspect that a child may not
be better off for a lot of boring afternoons drawing with crayons and bickering with
one best friend than they are with an infinite number of afternoons laid out in one-
hour blocks in a day planner.

If you set up a very basic set of priorities focused on outstanding physical and
emotional needs, fundamental education, and the great doors to culture – books
and art – you have given yourself a way of evaluating the ocean of options that will
press in on you as a parent.

An even more powerful tool is simply to use the “want/need” division. We all
know there is a real difference between “I want,” and “I need.” For things needed,
you should exert every effort to provide. Things merely wanted? Not so much,
though no parent ought to intentionally block a child from getting any of their
desires, either. But the best way to cope with the things a child desires is to try to
teach them to pursue those themselves, not demand you enable them.

If you find yourself faltering, thinking you should perhaps get that day planner
after all, and “provide” your child with all the advantages, stop and consider
whether you, as a child, would have enjoyed being ferried between activity after
adult-supervised activity, never still, never private, never even properly quietly
bored.

Quiet, privacy and boredom are healthy elements in a child’s life, as are limited
resources that demand creative thought to become entertaining. Your child is
honestly not likely to need to have had ballet, piano, Tai Kwon Do, soccer and Girl
Scouts when she reaches adulthood. She will absolutely, though, need to know
how to keep herself entertained, how to choose her own actions and activities, and
how to live without constant service or attention. When the temptation to pile on
the “benefits” presses you too closely, ask yourself what skills you need to cope
with your life, and then make sure your child learns those. They are more likely to
be toward education, ethics, and self-discipline than they are to activity, recreation
and socialization.

So there you have a basic principle of parenting: Managing the priorities and
holding to them. Do not damage your child by failing to make the hard choices
yourself. It is easy to convince yourself that more is better and that a decision that
includes everything is better than a decision that includes nothing – but that is not
true. The best gift you can give your child is the sight of you choosing clearly what
is important – and setting the rest aside. The very best gift is to show your kid you
are living your life as though he is one of your priorities – not because you run and
fetch and haul and tote, but because you give your child your time and your notice.


                                Centering Your Life

I sometimes think the current trend toward helicopter parents and drive-through
activities occurs because it is so much easier than trying to simply live with and for
a child without all that excess filler or pressing micromanagement. It takes courage
to parent in the simple, spare way of our best ancestors.

In the old days, there was no real room for helicopter parenting, or drive-through
soccer moms, or any of that. Mother and father were almost always both already
overwhelmed with the basic requirements of life, whether they lived in a city or out
on a farm. The effort and constant attention demanded to provide food and shelter
to a family outweighed any desire to micromanage a child’s life. To the extent that
children were micromanaged, it was largely wrapped around integrating them into
the working needs of their families.

Farmer’s children learned to chop and carry wood, milk cows, slop pigs, kill, pluck
and clean chickens, plow, and more. Why? Because quite frankly, most farms
needed every bit of help they could get to provide for a family. Urban children
helped tend stores, or watched over their siblings so a parent could afford an extra
job to help pay for rent and food. Children were not given make-work, they were
needed, and no one made any bones about it.

This was in many ways a superb thing, if also a burden and even an abuse. A child
might indeed, be pushed beyond his or her native ability, but there was often a
clear reason and a clear sense of pride and relief on the part of the whole family
when a child performed well. A child who showed a talent for training horses, or
raising poultry, or even for scholarship could contribute in clear ways to their own
family, and in many families work was imposed not simply out of theoretical belief
that it was good, but because everyone knew it was needed.

“Idle hands are the devil’s playground,” was not that different in underlying
attitude than our current belief that children “should” do chores and help with
housework. The difference is that in the past the connection between need and a
chore was far easier to see. If the chickens were not fed, they died. The cow who
went un-milked moaned out her pain, and her milk production slacked, losing the
family income or provisions. A deli-counter left unattended could lead to theft, or
the loss of sales income. A child might hate the chores, and even the religious
moralizing, but he or she would be unlikely to doubt the basic necessity that the
chore be done. Today, our chores are seldom as validating to a child. Yes, the
garbage must be taken out – but it can often be delayed without clear loss to
anyone, and a chore delayed is a chore forgotten to most kids.

The result of this shift from necessary work to make-work, and cosmetically
focused work has led to another change, too. In former days, a child worked with,
for, and around his or her parents, in constant involved interaction. A parent taught,
supervised, and managed a child while at the same time laughing, teasing, and
serving as an example for hours every day. Even parents who said or did little
more than was required were there, completely knit into the full day of a child.

Other children fared less well, but all in all more parent’s lives were lived with
their children, integrated, with their shared lives centered, whole, and cut from a
single piece of cloth. There was relatively little need for such modern proverbs as
“Spend at least one hour in social interaction with your child.” Nor did anyone
need to provide “context” to help a child understand the “moral value of honest
labor.” Social interaction started with sunup and ended with final prayers. Context
was a calf dead in a ditch because a gate was left open. Honest labor was the
income from tending the counter of the family store.

We face a much harder challenge, now, to center our lives and our children’s lives
on our family interactions. Work pulls us away, as do our social lives, our eternal
Internet involvements, our games, our television and movies. The underlying
economies of our lives are largely invisible to children who cannot see the
difference between an hour spent online doing labor and an hour spent online
playing World of Warcraft.

Yet our children need that centered, interactive, context-rich family life to grow up
to be the sanest, happiest, most capable people possible, with the healthiest
emotional and social lives. That health and happiness is not based on helicopter
parenting or through a hyper-sufficiency of activities. It is the result of a life of
integrated relationship with a family and circle of friends, in a setting a child can
hope to understand and watch with knowledge.

Some people try to provide that by dropping out entirely. “Back to the basics”
living is always a temptation. Home schooling movements, homesteading, and
other approaches to imitating the integrated and tightly involved lives of past
centuries are popular responses to the sense of disconnection many parents feel
threatening the core of family life. Others institute rule-laden ritualized lives, with
a framework of constant patterns maintaining the structure of family living and
parent-child interactions.

These are not bad choices. They increase the involvement between parents and
children, establish principles for which parents are clearly willing to live and fight,
and ensure children know without doubt they are important to their parent’s core
life choices. The intimacy, the structure, and the ritual practices all are old and
potent ways to strengthen personal bonds. However, not everyone can succeed as a
homeschooling small farmer, or draw on a ritual-rich daily life.

So it is important to adapt a bit. For you, the ritual laden life may be waking up
early and exercising with your child, both of you together in the faint dawn,
listening to your favorite music together. Constant context can be provided by
showing your child both the work and the play you are doing while staring into the
computer, sharing the nature of your job and inviting your child to join you in your
games. You can integrate your child into the labor needed to maintain your lives by
shopping, cooking, eating and cleaning up together in a regular pattern he or she is
not allowed to evade.

The important thing about being a parent is to make sure you live a full life, make
sure your child sees it and is fully involved with it, and that your work, play, life
and family are all woven together in a way that lets your child know you are
determined to live in a relationship with him, and lets him understand the example
you are making of your own life.

“Have you hugged your child today,” and “An hour of interpersonal time with your
child” are not bad rules of thumb. They will see you through in a pinch. But the
goal of a centered life with a fully integrated child comes closer. You may not ask
your child to do taxes with you, but you should live your life so he knows when
you are doing them, and why you do them correctly. Your life should not be lived
behind a veil, with your child peering in past the fabric trying to get a glimpse.


                           Discipline and Self-Discipline

For many people, the core question of parenthood has to do with discipline: How
to discipline a child, spanking or no-spanking, time out, tough love or tender love,
a cold parent serving as a disciplining god, or a gentle guide? How do you make
your child do as he is told, and grow as you would have him be? How do you deal
with mistakes? How do you deal with rebellion?

There is no simple answer, but there is a key thing to keep in mind in all the
decisions you make. The point of disciplining a child is not to achieve perfect
obedience to you. It is, in the long run, to encourage your child to achieve perfect
obedience to himself, and at the same time to addict him to moral standards that
will later ensure that his perfect self-obedience provides a decent human being who
will be a blessing to the world he lives in, rather than a curse.

That is an important distinction. A child who learns to be obedient to you, but only
to himself when that self is serving you in some sense, has very little true self-
discipline or moral understanding. No more than a flesh and blood sock puppet,
without you or some other authority figure he or she is unable to count on his own
moral compass, nor able to make a hard choice without a dreaded goad forcing his
decision.

It is not easy to raise a self-disciplined, personally ethical child. It is harder than
raising an obedient child and literature makes it clear that is no easy task in its own
right. Children lack so many of the things needed to make deeply good choices –
and when they fail to make good choices, the temptation to punish them to
encourage either more obedience or less experimentation is enormous.

The trouble is that you want a child who will be good when you are not watching
and not there to act as a witness. He has got to eventually become his own witness,
the judge who presides in sober sternness over your child’s own actions. Therefore,
the discipline you impose must not be aimed at mindless acceptance of your own
dictums, but at acceptance of the underlying morals and precepts. Punishment and
discipline should encourage your child not simply to submit to your orders, but to
his own ideals. That requires cleverness and thought on the part of any parent –
often more thought than a parent staring at a child-created disaster can summon.
Therefore, disciplinary decisions should focus not primarily on the negative
elements of a child’s life, but on the daily positives. As hard as it is to accept, the
most important disciplinary lessons you teach occur when there is no punishment
needed, no major mistake to be dealt with, and no obedience demanded. Negative
or punitive discipline has a limited place in raising a truly moral and independent
person with self-discipline, but it has less a place than constant positive
encouragement of desired behaviors.

That is much harder than it may sound. To encourage your child in positive traits,
you have to pay incredibly close attention, and be very smart about what your child
will consider rewarding. Praise? Yes, that often works. So do bribes – or
“payments” if you want to call them that. However, the most valuable tool
available to you as a disciplining parent is respect.

There are many types of respect. There is basic respect owed to all human life.
There is respect owed to those who try to live well, even when they fail dreadfully.
There is respect shown to those who succeed. Respect, though, is a fundamental
human need. People need to be respected. It teaches them how to respect
themselves and others.

Your child is most likely to learn the discipline and self-discipline you dream of,
and to learn a vigorous moral view of the world, if you start by respecting him as a
person from infancy. That does not mean simply treating a child as a little adult.
Indeed, that would be a catastrophe. It does, however, include recognizing the
dignity, and rightful pride a child feels, and recognizing their real personhood. A
child is not a toy, a pet, a trophy, a prop, a slave, a remote-controlled robot, or any
other such thing. While not an adult, a child is not a living thing.

Therefore, right or wrong, your child must first sense that you are not going to
assault his fundamental human dignity, humiliating a child as punishment, or
abusing him is a fundamental assault to that deep respect for his worth as a being.

There is another aspect of respect, however; respect not for a child, but for his
abilities and actions. As a child gains skills, demonstrates ability, and makes good
choices, there should always be a corresponding increase in the respect he earns.
This is not a matter of blind praise. Indeed, it has to be exact, often minimally
stated, and entirely connected with the child’s ability – though with fair recognition
of the limits the child still experiences.
So, for example, when a child learns to put on his own clothes in the morning, a
small child cannot put on clothing without assistance. No parent should waste time
pretending he or she can – nor should the child be disrespected for a lack of skill
that is inevitable. A parent helps, with respect and calm good will.

When a child rebels against that help as an affront to his or her dignity, a parent
may rebuke the acting out, but at the same time offer to let the child attempt to
dress himself. Offer lessened respect for the poor action, while continuing to
respect the child’s desire to take on a level of self-discipline and skill. As the child
learns, the parent should cede more and more independence to the child – not
praise, so much, though a bit of praise surely will not hurt. But the underlying
positive discipline is not the praise, but the liberty of telling a child, “Oh, good.
You can dress yourself now. I’ll let you take care of that, then.”

Punishment is often counterproductive, especially when it is seen as a primary tool,
rather than a secondary reinforcing agent. Punishment, if sever enough, can
discourage some actions; but it generally tends to breed rebellion not obedience
and cooperation. A child whose primary forms of discipline are negative, is given
so few positive reasons for pursuing self-disciple and positive choice-making on
his own, that he is likely to base much of his life merely on the evasion of
punishment and witness. That is essentially the opposite of the desired goal. No
one wants to end up with a child whose moral structure is merely based on getting
caught or not.

But again, focusing on fundamental respect for the person of the child, increasing
respect and liberty for gained skills and self-discipline, and carefully withdrawn
levels of respect when a child proves unable to perform as a self-willed adult in an
area, takes much more attention and precision than a punishment for a rebellion, a
bad choice, or a child’s failure to discipline himself. The truth is, most parents will
end up using both the positive and negative punitive techniques to maintain control
while raising a child.

Fortunately children are enduring, and will usually survive the muddle, forgive,
and love you anyway.

Parenthood is a dance between those truths: The truth that negative things happen,
less than ideal methods are used, and life is seldom perfect; and the equal truth that
if your bond with your children is good, and the love real, in the end your children
will survive and endure most of your mistakes. We would all prefer to be perfect.
As parents, we are not.
Fortunately, neither are our children. They are radiant, wonderful, complicated,
and admirable little packages of human spirit, who are designed to survive reality,
rather than wilt for lack of the ideal. If we love them, respect them, teach them our
ideals, and demonstrate them regularly, there is at least a hope they will survive
our failings, and if we are very lucky indeed, love us still.

If we teach our children to discipline themselves, and to understand our ideals, we
have done more than many have – and can take joy and pleasure in that, even if the
path to adulthood was filled with rebellions, mistakes, battles of will, lack of
obvious victories, and more. Do rightly by your children, check their worst habits,
encourage their best, show them your ideals by living them yourself – and refuse to
give up on them.

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Parenting

  • 1. Parenting What makes a parent? One thing: A child, in your absolute care. That child may make you a parent when you give birth, or when you adopt – or a child may, somehow, wander unexpectedly into your life, or be thrust on you by tragedy. A child may become you child-by-choice, picking you to stand in for a parent missing or in some way crippled by life. The trick is, once a child owns you, you’re a parent. You may have chosen that, or been waylaid by life’s unexpected detours. It makes very little difference how the relationship occurred. There you are: You and a child, struggling with the complicated, difficult, eternal challenges of the parenting relationship. The question from here on will never be how you got to that point, but what you do with your parenthood once it is been bestowed upon you. So the question is not how to be a parent: If you have got a child, you are stuck with the role, whether you wanted it or not. The question is how to be a good parent – and the answers are as varied as parents and children themselves, though some principles rule. The truth is that most of us will fail in the challenge, in some way or to some degree. Even the finest of parents falls short of perfection. That is not because there are no reliable, committed, intelligent, honest, caring, responsible parents giving superb attention to the children in their care. It is because the labor and ideals of parenting are infinite, and those who parent are merely human and finite – and because so much of parenting falls under the heading of “no right choices, only a range of better and worse wrong choices.” The job is too large, the ideals too constant, the obstacles too persistent and difficult, and the options often so limited that the best we can hope for is to raise a healthy child who loves us, and hope there is some kind of grace in the universe to cover all our errors. That said, there is plenty to know, consider, and learn about good parenting. Ancient and modern sources have plenty to say. The past offers us plenty of unsettling versions of good parenting, there are as many or more that can strengthen your sense of being part of a massive tradition of parents all working to raise up good children, with love and honor on all sides. The First Principle: A Parent is Forever
  • 2. Whether it makes you sober, or sends you howling in terrified laughter, the bottom line is, once a child has made you a parent, you will never stop being a parent. That is true no matter what: Whether you put the child up for adoption, or get in a car and run away; whether the child dies or you do. It is true when your child is little and it will still be true when you have lost five inches in height to age, and your “little baby” towers over you. To become a parent is to cross over an invisible border, and enter into a country from which you can never really return. As with most momentous border crossings, it might be best if you entered into this new, foreign land with the knowledge of that eternal change. But in all honesty, few parents can be said to have become parents as a result of deep, profound and accurate meditation on the ever-expanding ripples of change that will begin when a child enters their life. Instead, parenthood often seems to just sort of happen, and the philosophy often gets saved until much later. Even the most thoughtful, conscientious parent usually finds once the border has been crossed that the terrain was not quite what they expected when they got out their visa and walked across the barrier to the other side. It is hard to get your brain to really wrap around the notion of “forever.” A child does not even have to succeed in being born to carry his or her parents at least a few feet into that unknown country. Mothers and fathers who have lost children to miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirth, and abortion can testify that the slight, ephemeral moments a child existed in their awareness altered who the parents were in ways they could not have planned for. You cannot divorce a child. Even if you give a child away in adoption, that strand remains attached to you, a genetic and personal link to the future and to the world around you. It remains an experience you had, a choice you made, and a responsibility you are caught up in, for all the rest of your life. How you will see that play out is uncertain. You may even be among the few who never really sense the connection – leaving that awareness to your child, his adoptive parents, and all the people who deal with him in the decades to come. But the bond remains: Your child’s wife, looking into his face, will wonder, in passing, if she sees his mother in his eyes, his father in the shape of his hands. Your grandchildren, when asked, will tell people that their daddy was adopted, so they have grandparents, but do not know what their real grandparent are like – and even in saying so much, they will remind people of the bond to you that never broke, and never could break.
  • 3. Once you are a parent, you will never, ever again in your life be a “not-parent.” That truth can be replayed anew for each child you have, but it can never be destroyed from the moment you have your first child. Becoming a parent changes your very definition. In that, though, you are not alone. At least your utter change is known and shared by billions, in the past and present, and will be known by more in the centuries to come. The trick is for everyone, past, present and future, to accept the principle from the beginning: Being a parent is forever, and like all things eternal it deserves some time and attention, and a lot of responsible consideration. To Hold the Future in Your Hands Every living child is an arrow aimed at the future. Every child who dies is a possibility for the future denied, mourned not only for him or herself, but for all the tomorrows that will never happen as a result of death. When you hold a child, you are holding the future between the palms of your hands. Every action you take with a child is an investment that will only show results a year, a decade, or a lifetime from now. That being true, it is painfully easy to develop an overwhelming feeling of stage fright thinking about the choices you are going to be making as a parent. We can hear the sober, aggrieved voices of the adults our children will be, saying sadly, “My mother never loved me enough,” “My father was a bad role model,” “My parents had no idea of proper discipline.” If we are given to anxiety we worry our children will turn out badly, and commit dire crimes because we failed to parent them correctly. Then we think of gossip hosts on television, trotting out pictures of our children in their grubbiest clothes, announcing the darlings grew up in neglect and poverty. Or, if we come from academic backgrounds, we dream of our children becoming genius writers, or painters, or actors, or statesmen – and then we imagine the two-to-three academic texts produced yearly “proving” that these geniuses were abused by their parents, psychologically warped by their environments, and driven to extremes of distress by our lack of parenting skills. My advice? Well, keep it sort of in mind, in a back corner of your consciousness. It never hurts to know history will judge you, and that your results will be the proof of your methods. But beyond that?
  • 4. Forget about it. Let it go. It is impossible to make perfect choices for a future you can only imagine. It is hard enough to make choices for a present that is already right here. Focus on the child you have, in the life you are living now, and do not wring your hands over a future that may never happen. There is an old folk story – one of the many stories of “fools.” This one involves the most foolish son of a family leaving his home, to make his way in the world. His father tells him not to come home until he is found three people more foolish than he. For some time he wanders the world, learning a bit, developing his good sense, but he keeps failing to find anyone who he honestly thinks is sillier than he is. Until, at last, he enters a tavern after a long day on the road. He orders a meal and a pint of beer, and the daughter of the innkeeper runs off to take care of that. The Fool sits at his table, waiting for his dinner, but no dinner comes, and no beer. After a time he waves to the wife of the innkeeper, and she arrives. He explains; she apologizes and says she will go take care of it. Again he waits. Again he fails to get his dinner and his tall draft beer. He flags down the innkeeper and explains once more. Is once more told he will be taken care of – but no such luck. The innkeeper disappears, and the Fool waits, and waits, and waits. At last he gets up to see what could possibly be wrong. He searches the entire inn, and finds no one – not a sign of the innkeeper and his family – until he goes down to the cellar. There he finds all three, in tears, weeping and wailing and moaning and crying, each still holding an empty pitcher to hold the beer they have not yet drawn. The Fool asks what is wrong. The daughter points to an ax lodged in a high beam above the beer cellar. She says, “I thought you very handsome when you placed your order, and I thought if I were lucky, you would marry me. In time we’d inherit this in from my parents, who would retire to a little cottage in the town. We’d run the inn successfully, and be so happy! We’d have four children and we’d make good money, and everything would be grand until, one day, you’d come down here to draw the beer, and that ax would come loose from the beam and kill you dead!” And she began to cry again, louder than ever, and her parents with her. They wept and wailed and wrung their aprons, until at last the Fool reached up, pulled the ax from the beam, and handed it to the girl. “If you’d had even so much sense as to pull this ax free, all the good things you dreamed of might have happened, with none of the bad. You’re a pretty
  • 5. girl and this is a nice inn, and I would have been happy enough to marry you. But never will I marry into a family of people sillier than I.” When raising children, your chore is to remove axes you can see in the present, and let the axes of the future fall where they may. You cannot see them, and can only do so much to plan for them. So, take the future seriously. Realize your choices have consequences. But let go of the anguish and the fear of history watching over your shoulder. Concentrate on the present and the needs of the present, first. Priorities Okay, you have accepted this is a serious commitment that will change your life, but you have also accepted you cannot let that get to you. You are focused on the job, and the real child who needs you. Wonderful! Now I bet you are asking, “What next.” It is what I would ask, anyway. At some point, the rubber has to meet the road, and the actual child-rearing needs to begin, right? Well, mostly right. Now you have to get used to setting priorities – and then resetting them. And setting them over and over again with each new situation – and remember, by definition, a growing, learning, changing child changes the situation all the time. That is a kid’s job. To successfully keep up with shifting priorities, you have to – set priorities. Yes. That is just what I said. You need to set priorities to set proper priorities. Why? Because if you do not you and your child are going to be pulled apart by the war of conflicting demands. If you need to see an example of where poor priority stacking can end up, just go to a few parenting events and chat with the parents there. You will quickly find at least a few whose day planners are crammed with the 75 billion things they are tracking that absolutely must be done to raise their children successfully: Play dates, little league, a steady stream of doctor’s appointments, parent/teacher conferences, dance class, sleep overs, birthday parties – those to be given and those attended. There are pageants, and clubs and weekend activities and recreation and education and after a little while of listening to the litany, you begin to wonder how anyone can come out of that sane. People do. Some parents and children manage to surf the crest of the wave with ease. More manage to take spill after spill only to clamber back on the board. But only a few manage to stop and ask themselves what this is doing to their parenting. After all,
  • 6. look at all the demands they are meeting. Look how well they are ensuring their kids have it all. Their kids do not “have it all.” They have a lot, and much of it will be precious to them when they are grown. Much, however, will be remembered as a blur of kaleidoscope changes all swirling around a single, harried parent who is teaching only one lesson well and consistently: That if you cannot do everything, then you are a failure. Is this really a lesson any parent wants to bequeath to their child? That the rat race starts in preschool and does not end until you are forcibly shuffled off the shuffleboard at the end of life? Do you want your children believing that it is not so much that Girl Scouts is important, or dance class, or a My Little Ponies themed party, as that somehow you do all of it? Or would you rather your child learn young that life is about choosing, and then valuing what you choose? You begin to draw the line between you and rat race parenting by setting your own priorities and standards. You decide what is vital, and what is not. Here is a sample of priorities. Yours may and probably should be different in some ways, and on some levels, but it is a start. But it is roughly the set that I chose, and it will give you a sense of setting limits. First came my child’s basic needs: Fundamental medical attention, food, water, shelter, clothing, sleep, and an environment that meet a few basic criteria for safety and security. Love and a basic education – these came first, and nothing was to come between her and her true needs. After that came the enriching stuff: Ethical upbringing aimed at teaching her some standards of behavior. Books – as many as I could give her or convince her to read herself, were included. Access to art tools, music, and exposure to beautiful things – and plenty of discussion when possible. You quickly find out that it is not possible to inflict all that much lecture on an unwilling child and you settle for saying honestly and quickly what you do feel. That this particular book is the best fantasy you ever read as a child or that painting is one of your favorites in the entire world. Oddly, these flashing comments seem to matter more than all the erudition in the world. What matters most is to see Mom and Dad loving a great, complex world,
  • 7. and interacting with it. With luck, your child may come to do the same, even if she loves a painter you hate, and reads no fantasy at all. After that? Attention paid to a few friends, the occasional trip, treat or party, and you have covered what is needed. From that point on everything is not only optional, but should be considered with great caution before being added to a child’s life. A child can live without seven clubs, birthday parties with themed paper plates and hired entertainment, music and dance and sports lessons all at once, and so on and so forth. Indeed, it is hard not to suspect that a child may not be better off for a lot of boring afternoons drawing with crayons and bickering with one best friend than they are with an infinite number of afternoons laid out in one- hour blocks in a day planner. If you set up a very basic set of priorities focused on outstanding physical and emotional needs, fundamental education, and the great doors to culture – books and art – you have given yourself a way of evaluating the ocean of options that will press in on you as a parent. An even more powerful tool is simply to use the “want/need” division. We all know there is a real difference between “I want,” and “I need.” For things needed, you should exert every effort to provide. Things merely wanted? Not so much, though no parent ought to intentionally block a child from getting any of their desires, either. But the best way to cope with the things a child desires is to try to teach them to pursue those themselves, not demand you enable them. If you find yourself faltering, thinking you should perhaps get that day planner after all, and “provide” your child with all the advantages, stop and consider whether you, as a child, would have enjoyed being ferried between activity after adult-supervised activity, never still, never private, never even properly quietly bored. Quiet, privacy and boredom are healthy elements in a child’s life, as are limited resources that demand creative thought to become entertaining. Your child is honestly not likely to need to have had ballet, piano, Tai Kwon Do, soccer and Girl Scouts when she reaches adulthood. She will absolutely, though, need to know how to keep herself entertained, how to choose her own actions and activities, and how to live without constant service or attention. When the temptation to pile on the “benefits” presses you too closely, ask yourself what skills you need to cope with your life, and then make sure your child learns those. They are more likely to
  • 8. be toward education, ethics, and self-discipline than they are to activity, recreation and socialization. So there you have a basic principle of parenting: Managing the priorities and holding to them. Do not damage your child by failing to make the hard choices yourself. It is easy to convince yourself that more is better and that a decision that includes everything is better than a decision that includes nothing – but that is not true. The best gift you can give your child is the sight of you choosing clearly what is important – and setting the rest aside. The very best gift is to show your kid you are living your life as though he is one of your priorities – not because you run and fetch and haul and tote, but because you give your child your time and your notice. Centering Your Life I sometimes think the current trend toward helicopter parents and drive-through activities occurs because it is so much easier than trying to simply live with and for a child without all that excess filler or pressing micromanagement. It takes courage to parent in the simple, spare way of our best ancestors. In the old days, there was no real room for helicopter parenting, or drive-through soccer moms, or any of that. Mother and father were almost always both already overwhelmed with the basic requirements of life, whether they lived in a city or out on a farm. The effort and constant attention demanded to provide food and shelter to a family outweighed any desire to micromanage a child’s life. To the extent that children were micromanaged, it was largely wrapped around integrating them into the working needs of their families. Farmer’s children learned to chop and carry wood, milk cows, slop pigs, kill, pluck and clean chickens, plow, and more. Why? Because quite frankly, most farms needed every bit of help they could get to provide for a family. Urban children helped tend stores, or watched over their siblings so a parent could afford an extra job to help pay for rent and food. Children were not given make-work, they were needed, and no one made any bones about it. This was in many ways a superb thing, if also a burden and even an abuse. A child might indeed, be pushed beyond his or her native ability, but there was often a clear reason and a clear sense of pride and relief on the part of the whole family when a child performed well. A child who showed a talent for training horses, or raising poultry, or even for scholarship could contribute in clear ways to their own
  • 9. family, and in many families work was imposed not simply out of theoretical belief that it was good, but because everyone knew it was needed. “Idle hands are the devil’s playground,” was not that different in underlying attitude than our current belief that children “should” do chores and help with housework. The difference is that in the past the connection between need and a chore was far easier to see. If the chickens were not fed, they died. The cow who went un-milked moaned out her pain, and her milk production slacked, losing the family income or provisions. A deli-counter left unattended could lead to theft, or the loss of sales income. A child might hate the chores, and even the religious moralizing, but he or she would be unlikely to doubt the basic necessity that the chore be done. Today, our chores are seldom as validating to a child. Yes, the garbage must be taken out – but it can often be delayed without clear loss to anyone, and a chore delayed is a chore forgotten to most kids. The result of this shift from necessary work to make-work, and cosmetically focused work has led to another change, too. In former days, a child worked with, for, and around his or her parents, in constant involved interaction. A parent taught, supervised, and managed a child while at the same time laughing, teasing, and serving as an example for hours every day. Even parents who said or did little more than was required were there, completely knit into the full day of a child. Other children fared less well, but all in all more parent’s lives were lived with their children, integrated, with their shared lives centered, whole, and cut from a single piece of cloth. There was relatively little need for such modern proverbs as “Spend at least one hour in social interaction with your child.” Nor did anyone need to provide “context” to help a child understand the “moral value of honest labor.” Social interaction started with sunup and ended with final prayers. Context was a calf dead in a ditch because a gate was left open. Honest labor was the income from tending the counter of the family store. We face a much harder challenge, now, to center our lives and our children’s lives on our family interactions. Work pulls us away, as do our social lives, our eternal Internet involvements, our games, our television and movies. The underlying economies of our lives are largely invisible to children who cannot see the difference between an hour spent online doing labor and an hour spent online playing World of Warcraft. Yet our children need that centered, interactive, context-rich family life to grow up to be the sanest, happiest, most capable people possible, with the healthiest
  • 10. emotional and social lives. That health and happiness is not based on helicopter parenting or through a hyper-sufficiency of activities. It is the result of a life of integrated relationship with a family and circle of friends, in a setting a child can hope to understand and watch with knowledge. Some people try to provide that by dropping out entirely. “Back to the basics” living is always a temptation. Home schooling movements, homesteading, and other approaches to imitating the integrated and tightly involved lives of past centuries are popular responses to the sense of disconnection many parents feel threatening the core of family life. Others institute rule-laden ritualized lives, with a framework of constant patterns maintaining the structure of family living and parent-child interactions. These are not bad choices. They increase the involvement between parents and children, establish principles for which parents are clearly willing to live and fight, and ensure children know without doubt they are important to their parent’s core life choices. The intimacy, the structure, and the ritual practices all are old and potent ways to strengthen personal bonds. However, not everyone can succeed as a homeschooling small farmer, or draw on a ritual-rich daily life. So it is important to adapt a bit. For you, the ritual laden life may be waking up early and exercising with your child, both of you together in the faint dawn, listening to your favorite music together. Constant context can be provided by showing your child both the work and the play you are doing while staring into the computer, sharing the nature of your job and inviting your child to join you in your games. You can integrate your child into the labor needed to maintain your lives by shopping, cooking, eating and cleaning up together in a regular pattern he or she is not allowed to evade. The important thing about being a parent is to make sure you live a full life, make sure your child sees it and is fully involved with it, and that your work, play, life and family are all woven together in a way that lets your child know you are determined to live in a relationship with him, and lets him understand the example you are making of your own life. “Have you hugged your child today,” and “An hour of interpersonal time with your child” are not bad rules of thumb. They will see you through in a pinch. But the goal of a centered life with a fully integrated child comes closer. You may not ask your child to do taxes with you, but you should live your life so he knows when
  • 11. you are doing them, and why you do them correctly. Your life should not be lived behind a veil, with your child peering in past the fabric trying to get a glimpse. Discipline and Self-Discipline For many people, the core question of parenthood has to do with discipline: How to discipline a child, spanking or no-spanking, time out, tough love or tender love, a cold parent serving as a disciplining god, or a gentle guide? How do you make your child do as he is told, and grow as you would have him be? How do you deal with mistakes? How do you deal with rebellion? There is no simple answer, but there is a key thing to keep in mind in all the decisions you make. The point of disciplining a child is not to achieve perfect obedience to you. It is, in the long run, to encourage your child to achieve perfect obedience to himself, and at the same time to addict him to moral standards that will later ensure that his perfect self-obedience provides a decent human being who will be a blessing to the world he lives in, rather than a curse. That is an important distinction. A child who learns to be obedient to you, but only to himself when that self is serving you in some sense, has very little true self- discipline or moral understanding. No more than a flesh and blood sock puppet, without you or some other authority figure he or she is unable to count on his own moral compass, nor able to make a hard choice without a dreaded goad forcing his decision. It is not easy to raise a self-disciplined, personally ethical child. It is harder than raising an obedient child and literature makes it clear that is no easy task in its own right. Children lack so many of the things needed to make deeply good choices – and when they fail to make good choices, the temptation to punish them to encourage either more obedience or less experimentation is enormous. The trouble is that you want a child who will be good when you are not watching and not there to act as a witness. He has got to eventually become his own witness, the judge who presides in sober sternness over your child’s own actions. Therefore, the discipline you impose must not be aimed at mindless acceptance of your own dictums, but at acceptance of the underlying morals and precepts. Punishment and discipline should encourage your child not simply to submit to your orders, but to his own ideals. That requires cleverness and thought on the part of any parent – often more thought than a parent staring at a child-created disaster can summon.
  • 12. Therefore, disciplinary decisions should focus not primarily on the negative elements of a child’s life, but on the daily positives. As hard as it is to accept, the most important disciplinary lessons you teach occur when there is no punishment needed, no major mistake to be dealt with, and no obedience demanded. Negative or punitive discipline has a limited place in raising a truly moral and independent person with self-discipline, but it has less a place than constant positive encouragement of desired behaviors. That is much harder than it may sound. To encourage your child in positive traits, you have to pay incredibly close attention, and be very smart about what your child will consider rewarding. Praise? Yes, that often works. So do bribes – or “payments” if you want to call them that. However, the most valuable tool available to you as a disciplining parent is respect. There are many types of respect. There is basic respect owed to all human life. There is respect owed to those who try to live well, even when they fail dreadfully. There is respect shown to those who succeed. Respect, though, is a fundamental human need. People need to be respected. It teaches them how to respect themselves and others. Your child is most likely to learn the discipline and self-discipline you dream of, and to learn a vigorous moral view of the world, if you start by respecting him as a person from infancy. That does not mean simply treating a child as a little adult. Indeed, that would be a catastrophe. It does, however, include recognizing the dignity, and rightful pride a child feels, and recognizing their real personhood. A child is not a toy, a pet, a trophy, a prop, a slave, a remote-controlled robot, or any other such thing. While not an adult, a child is not a living thing. Therefore, right or wrong, your child must first sense that you are not going to assault his fundamental human dignity, humiliating a child as punishment, or abusing him is a fundamental assault to that deep respect for his worth as a being. There is another aspect of respect, however; respect not for a child, but for his abilities and actions. As a child gains skills, demonstrates ability, and makes good choices, there should always be a corresponding increase in the respect he earns. This is not a matter of blind praise. Indeed, it has to be exact, often minimally stated, and entirely connected with the child’s ability – though with fair recognition of the limits the child still experiences.
  • 13. So, for example, when a child learns to put on his own clothes in the morning, a small child cannot put on clothing without assistance. No parent should waste time pretending he or she can – nor should the child be disrespected for a lack of skill that is inevitable. A parent helps, with respect and calm good will. When a child rebels against that help as an affront to his or her dignity, a parent may rebuke the acting out, but at the same time offer to let the child attempt to dress himself. Offer lessened respect for the poor action, while continuing to respect the child’s desire to take on a level of self-discipline and skill. As the child learns, the parent should cede more and more independence to the child – not praise, so much, though a bit of praise surely will not hurt. But the underlying positive discipline is not the praise, but the liberty of telling a child, “Oh, good. You can dress yourself now. I’ll let you take care of that, then.” Punishment is often counterproductive, especially when it is seen as a primary tool, rather than a secondary reinforcing agent. Punishment, if sever enough, can discourage some actions; but it generally tends to breed rebellion not obedience and cooperation. A child whose primary forms of discipline are negative, is given so few positive reasons for pursuing self-disciple and positive choice-making on his own, that he is likely to base much of his life merely on the evasion of punishment and witness. That is essentially the opposite of the desired goal. No one wants to end up with a child whose moral structure is merely based on getting caught or not. But again, focusing on fundamental respect for the person of the child, increasing respect and liberty for gained skills and self-discipline, and carefully withdrawn levels of respect when a child proves unable to perform as a self-willed adult in an area, takes much more attention and precision than a punishment for a rebellion, a bad choice, or a child’s failure to discipline himself. The truth is, most parents will end up using both the positive and negative punitive techniques to maintain control while raising a child. Fortunately children are enduring, and will usually survive the muddle, forgive, and love you anyway. Parenthood is a dance between those truths: The truth that negative things happen, less than ideal methods are used, and life is seldom perfect; and the equal truth that if your bond with your children is good, and the love real, in the end your children will survive and endure most of your mistakes. We would all prefer to be perfect. As parents, we are not.
  • 14. Fortunately, neither are our children. They are radiant, wonderful, complicated, and admirable little packages of human spirit, who are designed to survive reality, rather than wilt for lack of the ideal. If we love them, respect them, teach them our ideals, and demonstrate them regularly, there is at least a hope they will survive our failings, and if we are very lucky indeed, love us still. If we teach our children to discipline themselves, and to understand our ideals, we have done more than many have – and can take joy and pleasure in that, even if the path to adulthood was filled with rebellions, mistakes, battles of will, lack of obvious victories, and more. Do rightly by your children, check their worst habits, encourage their best, show them your ideals by living them yourself – and refuse to give up on them.