Parenting Style Blues

I am incredibly grateful to be getting a second chance to parent young children… there are many reasons for this! To keep this blog brief though I am going to share the one that is foremost on my mind today.

When I became pregnant 21 years ago for the very first time, I could not believe my excitement and looking back my desire to do my very best.  I read and read widely.  I knew intrinsically that I would need extra help and somehow knew that I had to work a little harder than my peers at the times.  I did not even know one nursery rhyme!

Well, at the time we lived in Tyler, Texas in the USA.  We lived in a strong Christian Community.  Mom’s took me in to the “inner circle” in a very special way when I got pregnant.  They were so very good to me.  I got so many gifts, advice, care… it was incredible. My “abandoned” heart needed it! However, the parenting guru of the day who everyone was raving about was Gary Ezzo.  He had two courses out that I knew of… the names now would send shivers down my spine, but at the time I was so gullible and vulnerable to anyone I thought had more knowledge than me.  Gary Ezzo books in the wrong hands are dangerous!

The course basically prescribed sleep training and first time obedience.  Having grown up in a very paternalistic and punitive community as a child, it seemed about right to go that route.  After all kids should learn to obey us, or how will they ever obey God, right?

My first baby slept through the night from 6 weeks… this was after I let her cry it out to train her.  I am so ashamed now, but at the time I had a veteran mom on the phone listening to the cry, as I sobbed…. “Pull through honey she told me; she will learn!” She did and quickly!

She went on to be a very compliant little girl… so she was so easy to teach first time obedience to! But in her teen years the flaws in my parenting strategy started to show up…

My second child was born when she was 2, we were very good at family planning.  However, he was not going to play by Gary’s rules, and it was very clear that I could not do the “training” by myself, now thousands of miles from that community and insecure… I remember talking to a friend about my struggle to train him and she confronted me with disgust.  I am so grateful for her reaction that got me thinking deeply and looking for another way… but fast forward to his diagnosis of autism and behavioural training… again I hang my head in shame.  I clearly still did not have enough confrontation of my flawed belief system shaped by home, church and school as a child to see how far I still had to go.

Things changed dramatically for us when we learnt about Relationship Development Intervention training and we were forced to play as a family to help our boy and before you know it, he was sleeping, talking and mainstreamed in a primary school.  This key time has greatly impacted me now!  As I have seen the power of what it is we were doing… but did not know the theory back then.

By the time my youngest biological child was born, probably thanks to exhaustion and change of heart and mind we let her sleep with us and fed her whenever she wanted and played a lot and… we already here started parenting differently and seeing some shifts in the way she was presenting in her early childhood.

Now, before you think I was the worst mother on earth let me tell you what I was good at.  I was very good about tuning into my children’s individuality and looking for their gifts.  I was convinced all children have at least one or two.  I wanted my children to have voice and choice… and then the next parent guru of the time entered my story, Daniel Silk.  This felt like it was a freeing way to parent, with truth and grace.  However, when I look back I was still so far off the mark!

I took parenting my biological children very seriously… I took developing their talents and their voice and expression seriously.  So why were they all so anxious? 

Well, I think one reason is because I missed the point that raising a child to be secure and safe, they need to have a strong core, being in touch with their own feelings, their thinking and helping them problem solve the things in their lives they needed solutions for and allowing them to make mistakes.  Allowing them to bring their thoughts and thinking and attuning to that before correcting.  I worked so hard to look out for them and protect them from all harm and give them the best world.  Another blog about failure in this strategy another day.

I have learnt from my children that you can be amazingly talented and do the best at what you do, but still feel so bad about yourself and so out of touch with your inner world.  I have learnt that controlling circumstances even if you have given a child a lot of freedom, is still control…  I have learnt that I was a mom who caused a lot of stress!

I have learnt that I missed precious moments of soothing, comforting and helping them grow confident in their own self, that I dis-empowered them to believe in themselves, as I took first time obedience, correction and discipleship to be the most important task of being a mother! I was very good at fixing their worlds and teaching them to fix their mistakes and how to fix others mistakes too! Do not get bad images of me hitting my kids here, but images of me with books and giving lectures and good advice…of me talking to moms whose kids “hurt” mine and teachers when there was injustice (a biggie for me) and reworking the system or influencing the reworking of a system to improve it whenever I had learnt something new.

It does not help to give a child a big voice, but then leaving them in moments they need you most, because you are already planning how to “fix it” for them…  this is when they need you most! I should have sat and listened more and reflected their feelings and said loudly to my own feelings, that I would look at 'them' later, as right now I am parenting!  I should have just held them longer 
in the tough times!

JUST BE first and let them BE!  They are much more pliable when understood...

Disciplining a child is so much easier when they feel seen, heard and understood!

I have learnt so much in the last two years.  I am so grateful...

To my bio children I wish I knew more back then… 

I wish I was not so insecure!