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Let me tell you a story.
It’s a story that can be interpreted very differently, depending on your opinions of child rearing, and parental behaviour.
When I had my child I had post natal depression. My baby had colic. Colic is uncontrollable, extended crying in a baby who is otherwise healthy and well-fed. I walked up and down the road I lived in for extended periods of time, I bounced, I patted, I cuddled, I breast-fed, I sung, I rocked, and then I did it all over again. My husband did too. One day after a period of around 5 hours of my son’s crying, after I had had no sleep at all that night, I felt so angry with my son I really thought I was going to hit him and I couldn’t trust myself not to.
So I locked him in his room, put the key in my car, sat in a room at the other end of the flat and rung my Mum. She drove 50 miles straight away without asking why or questioning me and when she got there I told her where the room key was, she got my baby and took over for a bit so I could sleep. So, the baby ended up OK, and I ended up OK.
You see, I think that story shows that I am a good parent. (I also think it shows my Mum to be a good parent.) My health visitor at the time thought it was the right thing to do. But you might not. You may think that I am a bad parent because I nearly lost my temper, or you may think I am a bad parent because I left my baby on his own in a room for an hour. But what would you have done? You see there is no right or wrong. With children, we can only do what feels right at the time we are faced with the problem, there are often problems, and many of them will not be experiences you have had before.
I'd be interested to know who here (other than Bitchiekittie and Grant) has children, and whether or not people feel they can effectively contribute to a thread about parenting without actually having had a go at it.
I ask this because it seems to me that parenting is one of those 'best laid plans' and all that. Everyone thinks they know how to do it, everyone thinks they know all the answers, what not to do wrong, the right way to do things. But I think most of peoples initial parenting ideals are actually just reactive. We parent in response to the way we were parented. We make statements. Such as:
Statement No. 1 – I will not react that way when I have children.
Statement No. 2 – I will allow my children all the freedom I did not have as a child.
Statement No. 3 – I will bring my children up in the same way as I was brought up, after all it never did me any harm.
Statement No. 4 – I will never make my children do x because when I was made to do x as a child I found it extremely upsetting.
Statement No. 5 – I will always give reasons for and explain rationally and sensibly why I am asking for something to be done. I will never say ‘Because I said so.’
Statement No. 5 is mine, because as a child that sentence used to infuriate me. So I try very hard to explain things; “you can’t scoot across the road because you might slip and fall off into incoming traffic. It isn’t safe.” But have I ever said “Because I said so.”? Of course I have! I say it all the time when confronted with the “why, but why, but why, why” repetition that is inherent behaviour in all children. I can answer sensibly and rationally about six times, and then I revert to the tried and tested ‘Because I said so”.
I give you this example as a way of showing you that you can study and learn and plan and predict ‘good’ parenting behaviours but however open minded, patient, gentle, kind and clever you are there comes a point when you will get cross, be brusque, give an unplanned or simplistic answer where perhaps you would imagine you might gently explain, and this doesn’t IMO in any way make you a bad parent. However good you may think you are, children can frequently be extremely frustrating. That’s the nature of being a child and they can’t help it, but it can still be waring sometimes.
Children succumb to the ‘naughty temptation’ that adults have learned to repress. This sometimes makes us (even as adults) frustrated. How many parents have you heard asking children to grow up? If 95% of the time I react to my child as I would wish, but for 5% of the time I lose my temper or don’t give him enough attention, or say ‘Yes dear’ when he tells me something but I am not really listening, does that make me a bad parent? No. It just makes me human.
If I make a mistake, and make a remark in front of my child which I then find out is offensive does that make me a bad parent? No, I don’t think so, but other people do, as was evident in the Red Indian thread. Everyone has a theory for how you should bring a child up, and the people who are the most vocal about it are often the ones who don’t have children.
You could ask what, as far as our society is concerned, the key 'rules' of parenting are.
Well maybe these are some of the things we should bring our children up to be:
Thinking
Caring
Kind
Tolerant
Gentle
Diplomatic
Active
And maybe they shouldn’t be:
Unkind
Intolerant
Insensitive
Aggressive
Sedentary
Agreed? Some people would disagree. Some people would say that a certain amount of aggression is a healthy thing. You see, it’s all opinion. Of course there are basic characteristics that we all (I would hope) want our children to have, and I would say that most parenting comes down to basic common sense. We all know it’s wrong to steal, so we teach our children not to. We all know it’s wrong to be unkind, so we teach our children how to be caring and kind.
But lots of basic parenting is also related to fashion. In Victorian times it was seen as correct to leave a baby to cry, and feed it only at specific times. Then fashions changed and we were taught that a baby should be fed on demand. Now fashions are changing again, and techniques such as the Controlled Crying Technique (where you leave a baby to cry for a pre-determined length of time before going to it) are considered ‘right’.
Maybe parenting is like stumbling through a pitch black tunnel leading your child by the hand, and feeling the way with your toes as you go. The best you can hope for is that you get to the other end safely, but in all likelihood you will both fall over at least once along the way. However, if you both come out at the other end all in one piece but with a few scrapes on your knees then I think you’ve done a good job really. |
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