Be your own expert
Sunday, September 18th, 2011“Nikki Bush is evil. She told my mother I could only watch TV for two hours a month!”
(A Foundation Phase learner overheard speaking to her friends in the playground recently.)
One of the challenges of being a 21st century parent is that we are drowning in information and opinions around the raising of our children, largely as a result of technology and connectivity. Information and knowledge are in plentiful supply but much of the inter-generational wisdom has fallen away with the rise of the nuclear family, and large geographic distances separating extended family. Instead, we listen to experts “who should know”. Empowered, intuitive parents and common sense parenting skills seem to be in short supply.
My theory is that we are parenting too much from our heads and not connecting with our hearts and our intuitive gut feel – our sense of ‘knowing’. This is because head and heart have become disconnected due to our busyness and multi-tasking, fragmented lifestyles, affecting our own inner confidence and self-esteem around the more emotional issues of life. Many parents fear making the wrong choices or suffering the consequences of any mistakes they might make. Take heart, children are not quite as fragile as you think and you can make course corrections along the way!
Few parents have realised that parenting is about learning and growing with their children, on the run, as life unfolds in it’s often crooked line. Spanish poet, Antonio Machado said: “We make the path by walking on it.” No two parenting paths are the same and yet we mentally compare ourselves to others all the time. We wonder, “What does this look like from the outside?” instead of asking ourselves, “How does this feel on the inside, for myself and my child?”
So what should we do with all the information that we acquire on our parenting journey from books, TV and radio programmes, talks and workshops? And never discount the car park chatter – the information that moves like wildfire along the school grapevine can have a very powerful effect on us when we are not feeling very confident. The trick is to take it all in, internalise it, mull over it, chew on it, measure it against your value system, feel it in your gut and then keep what resonates for you and spit out the rest. Let it go. If you need it, your conscience will be pricked again and you can always go back to it and adopt it at a later stage.
Referring to the quote, or misquote, from the little girl at the top of this article, it should actually read two hours per day of total on-screen time and not only two hours of TV only per month!. I did have a quiet giggle when this comment was emailed to me a few days after speaking at the school, but I was also saddened by how disempowered parents feel that they have to actually tell their children word for word what they learnt in a parenting workshop, and from whom, quite literally giving away their own power and credibility in the eyes of their child.
Parents, you need to position yourselves as experts in your own homes! Yes, none of us knows it all, and we all make mistakes. Make them confidently, rather than tentatively, with all the skills, knowledge and intuition you have at your disposal. All of parenting is an adventure with attendant risks. Once you have acquired some new information and you have filtered it through your system – the head and heart of an expert (you are, after all, the perfect parent for your child), then own that information and find a way to incorporate it into your parenting without making a big thing of it in front of your child. Quietly adopt change as if it was any other day of the week and not necessarily something extra-special. Then you will find that your children will accommodate the changes easier, possibly without even noticing, and will be following you as the leader and expert in your own home.
There is a saying, as within so without, which refers to the interconnectedness of all things and all people. If you want to see changes in your children, that change first starts with you. Very often just a shift in your own perception about something, or your commitment to using your time slightly differently, can have a powerful knock-on effect without you actually having ‘to make your child do something differently’ or without having ‘to fix your child’. It makes parenting a whole lot easier. Perhaps you should give it a try and at the same time it will quietly position you as an expert in your own home.
There are moments in every parent’s life when their child turns on them and says things in anger or frustration like, “You’re such an ugly mother, you’re so horrible!” On Thursday morning I will be discussing the importance of parents “being the boss” and “holding their line”. The interview is scheduled to air at 6.40am but tune in at 6.30am in case it is a few minutes earlier.
We get so uptight about doing things perfectly, from providing our children with a perfect education to the perfect party, and the most perfect life we can create for them (and more). Our pursuits can be accurately called perfection addiction — a process that calls us into judgement all the time, mostly with ourselves because we feel guilty if we don’t measure up to our expectations, which is often the picture of looking good, to the outside world.
