PARENTING BOOK

I don’t know how many times in the last six years I’ve wished that parenting had come with an instruction manual. I’m sure that I am not alone in this. What is the right way to get these little versions of ourselves to put their toys away when that is obviously the very last thing that they want to do? What is the best way to explain to them why the friend that they normally hang out with at daycare/school has now decided to tell them that they don’t like them? My kids are young; they’ve just scratched the surface of the endlessly challenging aspects of raising kids. In a time where the news is full of the rise of the abuse of opioids, distracted/drunk driving, missing children, mass shootings, and much higher suicide rates, I find myself getting overwhelmed at the task of raising my kids so that they will be prepared to live on their own in society. How much is too much to explain? What’s not enough? See where the temptation for a “parenting blueprint” might be tempting? There are more resources for parenting these days, so we do have that option. I’m hesitant to say whether that’s an advantage or not. I believe that it depends on what you are going to use them for. To be honest though, something that I have really learned over the last couple of years is that no one knows the best way to parent. There is no fool proof method to parent the right way, nor should there be. Each person in this world is unique. We all have our own special DNA sequencing, life experiences, gifts, personalities, and souls. I feel that the thinking that there would be one fool proof method to raising these unique individuals is an injustice to yourself and your children. There is no one out there in this world that knows better how to parent your kids than yourself. No one. For the first couple of years of our son’s life, my husband would be a little anxious to bring him to his periodic doctor checkups.  Every time that he would bring him to these appointments, the doctors would look over my son’s weight, height, etc. information and then look at my husband with a judging expression. “Your son is extremely underweight for his age.” “He’s at the very bottom of the scale.” “What are you feeding him?” Each appointment would start in the same fashion. Then my husband would explain that my son eats more than him, a grown man and that he eats snacks throughout the day. We’d never limited the amount of food or water that he could have and still don’t today. The “problem” is that our son is very active and likes to stay busy. By the end of each doctor appointment (after being cooped up in a small office with my son for a few minutes), the doctors would always ask, “Is he always this active”? At my husband’s nod in the affirmative, the doctors would then always respond with, “He appears to be healthy and if he’s always this active, then I can definitely see why he’d be on the lower end of the scale with weight.” Since we were assigned to a team of doctors instead of just one family medical doctor, this process was repeated several times. I share this story to underline the problem with applying a standardize anything to our kids. We knew our son was perfectly fine because we were with him every day and knew what he was consuming and how he acted. That being said, if you want to look for resources on parenting to give yourself ideas for different techniques that you can try to help navigate a difficult situation, do it! I’ve looked things up online, read different parenting books, talked to family and friends, etc. It’s astonishing how many resources we do have today. Some things that I have tried have worked and others haven’t. I think the key to parenting is to trust your gut and go with what you feel is right for each individual kid in each individual circumstance. That’s not to say that there aren’t set boundaries that all of your kids need to follow and need to be held to the same consequences because that is very important as well. I have two kids and they are extremely different. When my son gets upset, he internalizes. He doesn’t want to talk about it and he wants his space to be left alone for a bit. He’ll rejoin us when he is ready and he doesn’t want to talk about it right away. Oftentimes, later that day or the next, he’s started to open up about what he was feeling and why. When my daughter gets upset, she likes to storm out of the room and be left alone for a little bit. However, when she has calmed down, she is often very vulnerable and raw. She wants to be told that she’s loved and held for a little bit. These aren’t things that you can be told in a book or on the internet. These are things that you find out through trial and error while raising your kids. You will grow as a family through each one. Have faith, take a deep breath, and go be the best parent that you can be to your children.

Love,

Yara Rose