I hope everyone had a very nice Mother’s Day. I did. I took the whole day off.
But, having spent a good chunk of my day with my mother and talking about how things have changed over the past few generations, it got me thinking. My mother’s biggest struggle as a parent was finding out how to be one. She had moved across the country from her family. And she doesn’t say this, but I’m willing to bet that she didn’t want to emulate her own mother’s parenting style. My grandmother – a lovely, blessedly wild woman, who was also, sadly, the product of some horrendously bad parenting – did her best, but treated my mother abusively, and the relationship remained rocky.
My mother, in turn, worked her butt off trying to reverse her mother’s mistakes, with varying degrees of success. But here was this incredibly intelligent woman trapped in a social role that would not allow her to be all she was and still be socially acceptable, and that was very important for my mother. Frankly, it was all women had in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
So here I am, hitting adolescence right as the social order gets a major hit to the collective breadbasket. Traditional gender roles are out, good self-image is in. And by the mid-1980s, I’m a parent, myself. But parenting is now a science and the media is busy telling us to empower our kids and protect them from harm at all costs. The idea of more permissive parenting styles had been around since the early part of the 20th Century. And I’m not entirely sure if I was just more aware of it at the time I was raising my daughter because I was raising my daughter – and naturally more interested in the subject.
But I was determined to learn about parenting. There were things my mother had done very right that I wanted to be sure I did – that, by the way, were in conflict with some of the more popular theories of the time. I was a relatively strict parent, compared to many of my peers. Although I do remember a time when the kid had acted out and I had corrected her. One friend took me to task for being so hard on her and another obviously felt I was not near hard enough.
Okay. Fast forward. The biggest complaint I hear in the media and from some of my teacher friends is that today’s parents are a little too empowered – to the point that they won’t take advice from anybody, even when they need it. Dr. Drew Pinsky, in a recent interview, said that it was a function of narcissism – that because these parents were brought up so as not to have their tender little self-images bruised, they have, instead, developed a sense of entitlement.
This is certainly the far end of the spectrum. Today’s young parents are not lacking in compassion. And I firmly, firmly believe that they want the best for their kids. But while parents of my generation and just beyond were goaded by a media that fed our fears of being judged (at the very least) to fears that our children would be irreparably harmed, today’s parents are thankfully, all but convinced that they know what they’re doing. And probably some do and some don’t. Like the rest of us.
The good part about all the information on parenting out there is that it really does help to have some understanding of child development so that when your 2-year-old starts having temper tantrums, you have some tools to help you deal with it pro-actively and effectively. But it can still work against you when what the pros say doesn’t work with your particular kid. Or when the teacher doesn’t seem to understand what your child really needs.
So how do you know when you’re being full of yourself and when you’re advocating appropriately for your child? First off, you’ve got to be willing to listen. If your daughter’s pre-school teacher says she bites other children, she probably does bite other children. If you’re going to advocate appropriately, you have to be open to that. It doesn’t mean you have to buy it lock, stock and barrel. But you do have to investigate, which starts with talking to your kid and hearing what he or she has to say. Even teens will usually give it away when they’re lying.
Secondly, find a good sounding board, someone who’s willing to tell you the uncomfortable truth in a loving way. Hopefully, if there are two parents in the home, that will be your life-partner/spouse. If you’re a single parent, you may have to get a little more creative. This is called the reality check. It’s a big help because we can’t always see objectively when it comes to our kids.
Finally, you have to be willing to ask what’s driving the behavior. The biter could be modeling the behavior of another kid who just hasn’t gotten caught yet. It could be you don’t deal well with your own frustrations. And we do unconsciously pass our own bad habits onto our kids. My grandmother did it to my mom, my mom did it to me and I did it to my daughter.
As my daughter observed when she was 13, each parent tries to do better than the previous generation. That sometimes means we go too far in the other direction. But at least we’re thinking about what we’re doing. As long as we’re willing to look at our parents’ efforts and repeat what they did right, we’re on the right track, even if we don’t get it right.
The good news is that our kids still manage to come out okay. My daughter certainly did. She may not have done the fancy internship in South America or gotten into Harvard. But she was present to her friend when the friend’s own husband wasn’t. She calls me voluntarily. And, oh, yeah. She graduated from college and is working and out of the house. Nor do I have to hover or help her out.
Anne Louise Bannon
Your Family Viewer
