It’s been a long time. There are reasons. I am busy with the boys. I am also lazy with some things and easily distracted always. I also was not inspired. I don’t mean that I was waiting to be struck by the Muse. This is, after all, just a blog. I just never felt like I had much to share.
When the boys were small, I was making discoveries all the time. Practical aspects of caring for them at their most helpless and hapless. Emotional realizations about how things affected me and might be affecting other parents out there. These were thoughts that felt worth sharing because they might spur some good ideas in someone else or at least be something to commiserate with for someone down in the trenches.
That feeling tapered off and it has felt for a long time like we have been treading water. The boys are growing and are wonderful boys, but they each have their quirks (one perhaps too aggressive at times, the other perhaps too sensitive at times) that seemed to be aspects that our parenting was only exacerbating.
Recently Janelle and I took a parenting class offered at Joshua’s school. 2 hours a week for 4 weeks. It sounds silly, taking a class on something you have been doing full-time for nearly six years. It sounds like a doctor treating patients for half a decade and then deciding, “You know, maybe I should actually find out if I’ve just been slowly killing people all this time…”
The class I think will be transformative for us as parents. We learned a great deal from it and I’ve absorbed a wide variety of the items taught into my daily routine. I’ll write a few of those things up later. One of the things that I felt made the lessons taught in the class so effective is that it was clearly produced in the 80s. There were a lot of bad decisions made in the 80s. My kid-mullet, for example. What the 80s didn’t have, though, is the strange media culture that we have today around parenting. There is a constant barrage of sort of fad-parenting, just as there are now infinite variants on dieting that you can take on. The message imparted from the class felt clear of that noise. The entire point is learning to treat your children like actual other human people with lives and dreams of their own. It sounds totally dumb to say it like that, but I have always considered myself a good parent and I was fairly shocked to realize the various ways I was selling the boys short.
But the indirect lesson I want to cover this week (because it wasn’t specifically something talked about in the course) is a favorite saying of mine: Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
I suffer from this in nearly all aspects of my life. I don’t write scripts because I can’t just throw things at the wall to see what sticks and revise until I’m happy. If it doesn’t hit the page as a filmable script, why am I even writing it? It occurred to me that’s why, really, I stopped writing these blog posts. I wasn’t being the perfect parent. I wasn’t solving all of the problems, so what’s the use of my even talking about it? I’d just be telling everyone else how to not be the best at something.
And it was affecting how I treated the boys.
I never did anything so obvious or dramatic as yell at them about how they weren’t good enough, or make Joshua practice letters until they looked perfect and his fingers hurt. Nothing so nefarious, but certainly more insidious — I didn’t let them do things for themselves.
Take something simple like prepping the table for dinner. If Joshua asked to help set the table, I’d tell him no because I didn’t want him to make a mess. Or I’d tell him the plate was too heavy. Or too hot. Or I’d tell him that the milk was too full and he’d spill so I would do it myself. I’d serve them the food they asked for so they wouldn’t take too much or drop some all over the table.
Every single one of those things come off totally harmless. You’d likely never bat an eyelid at a parent saying that to their kid. Dishes can be super hot. Milk is very easily spill from a full container. Salad can totally get all over the table if you aren’t careful. But the underlying message is “You can’t do this thing.” You teach them to need the support of authority. You teach them that not being perfect at something means you might as well not even start trying.
If you want to get all fancy about it, self-respect and self-esteem are pretty chief on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. After having things like food and shelter and love, humans need to feel like they are capable and that they matter. They need to understand that their actions have value and worth and an effect on those around them. It might sound overly dramatic to apply this to a 5-year-old and 3-year-old setting the table at dinner, but there are lots of very formative things going on in a kid’s brain. They are training themselves in how to see the world for the rest of their life.
So now, when Matthew wants to put the hummus away and his method involves grabbing the hummus from the table, walking to the kitchen, trying to grab a stool, not being able to, putting the hummus container down in the middle of the carpet in the dining room, dragging the stool over to the fridge, grabbing the hummus, putting the hummus down again so he can open the fridge, picking up the hummus and tip-toeing up super high so he can get it back to where he saw it before instead of just putting it right on the easy-to-reach spot right in front of his face, I don’t do anything other than not have to put the hummus away myself. A part of my brain calls out that you shouldn’t put hummus on the carpet — but that’s just perfect rearing its head. The hummus is sealed. It’s not getting anything dirty at all. Who cares if that’s not how I would do it. I don’t tell him not to use the high shelf because if he can reach it, great. It’ll be back where it should be, and he’ll feel good he was able to reach something so tall by himself.
Just by allowing them to do little things like this, in their own way, I am telling them that it is okay to try. It is okay to find your own way. It is okay to ask for help when you decide need it. It is okay to want to help. They are important enough to be in charge of something. They are trusted enough to not be micro-managed. On the selfish side of things, they will start to have helping with little household tasks just be a part of their life.
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