| Issue: | 20,2002 | Page: | 12 |
| Abstract: | Parenting is about relationships, not about skills and techniques. |
| Keywords: | Relationship, Children, Parenting. |
With
spring in the air and the juices flowing to all the right parts of the
body, this is a good time to develop the animalistic part of your
relationship and heal any possible winter rifts in that warm afterglow,
if you get my drift. If you are stuck for ideas I recall that I wrote
about that very topic two or three issues ago. Hooray for technology,
because it's all on the web now at Father & Child's amazing website.
But this
column is about a different kind of relationship altogether: the
relationship between you and your child. For it occurred to me that in
all the hullabaloo about smacking or not smacking, inclusive and
exclusive timeout, setting limits and other troublesome parenting
issues, our mostly self-styled parenting experts tend to forget about
the fact that parenting is as much about the relationship between two
people as it is about practices. And whenever two people have to live
together in the same place for any length of time, you get personality
matches and mismatches, harmony and conflict all between the same
people. Just because we're sometimes (often?) rather annoyed with our
offspring and wish them someplace else doesn't mean we don't love them.
It's not always quite as obvious that they love us - sure, we know they
do, but it often seems more in the kind of way you love your doormat
because otherwise you wouldn't have something to wipe your feet on.
It's that I-love-you-now-buy-me-some-lollies kind of love.
But
that's what a parent-child relationship is like. Your three year old
tells you "I hate you", probably because you denied him something, and
it hurts just as much as if anyone else had said those very same words.
But you can't retaliate, nor can you talk things over in any mature
kind of way. Some days you really don't like your kids at all.
Modern
parent educators try to tell us that parenting is really just another
job, for which parents should preferably have some training. After all,
you're not supposed to be able to fly an airplane the first time you
enter a cockpit. But then - an aero plane doesn't talk back.
No,
parenting is not just another job. Too many other things come into it:
instincts, your own history as a child, your personality, the child's
personality, spiritual issues and the fact that it is your own flesh
and blood you're dealing with. Your child is not like a car, where some
fix will make it run better. Your child responds differently to you
than to anyone else. And you respond differently to your child than to
anyone else, including any other children you may have. And each of
your children will respond differently to the exact same way of
parenting. Hey, it's a relationship between two people.
Relationships
come with emotions, the good ones and the ones that make us regret
we've ever shown them to our children. In a healthy relationship the
good times make up for the bad times - in an unhealthy one there are no
good times. There are techniques to deal with your child's
misbehaviour, whatever the age, but you have to allow for your own
emotions to make any of them work. Kids don't need parenting machines,
who do everything by the book, the "right" way. They need real people.
Their actions trigger re-actions in other people, and your re-action
contains an important lesson. People have the power to make other
people feel good or bad, content or angry. What it is that ticks people
off either way is one of the most important lessons to learn, and to
learn them from you is safer than any other way.