Amorphous

I think our society makes raising children too difficult. The intentions are good: we all want to raise our children to be the best, healthiest, happiest children ever while still maintaining as much of ourselves as possible. But everyone has a different idea about what that means. The parenting section at any bookstore is full of titles. Aside from the very basics — you should feed your kid every now and then, etc — hardly any of them agree with one another.

The very first human parents ever didn’t read a book on the subject. Surely they did something right, because we’re all here, right? Like much of my philosophy on anything else, my thoughts on parenting are formed from common sense, experience, and observations of society. I intend to raise a free-thinking, free-acting, free-loving human being but, at the same time I understand that it is my duty as parent to pass on the information needed to actually exist within this society even if we don’t fully agree with it.

Considering the parenting methods I’ve most commonly seen, my biggest departure is probably in the area of discipline. Put simply, I don’t punish. I believe that direct punishment does not achieve the goal we seek regardless of the punishment or the goal. Consider a very simple, natural form of punishment. Imagine a tree, begging to be climbed, and at the base of the tree, a coiled, unseen snake. If a child should see this tree and decide to climb it, he’ll be met with the punishment of snake bite.

Now consider yourself. Consider every child you’ve ever known. After being bitten, does that child decide that he’ll never again climb a tree? More than likely, he either learns nothing or, over time, learns to look out for snakes. What if we are very diligent about our discipline? What if there is snake under every tree? Does that child “learn his lesson” then? Maybe so. Or he develops a hatred for snakes and an uncanny ability for killing them. In the end, however, one thing remains: The child never learns that climbing trees is bad. If anything, he only learns that snakes are bad. And why should he? The more important thing remains: climbing trees was never bad in the first place.

I believe this same situation occurs when parents punish their children. If the child is too young to fully understand why something was wrong, then he is too young to understand that the punishment he is receiving is “for his own good”. If he’s old enough, then he either didn’t know that what he was doing was wrong, or he did know and decided to do it anyway, knowing there would be a punishment. How many times were you punished for intentionally doing exactly what your parents told you not to do? If the answer is more than once, then did the punishment really make a difference?

A young child  learns that opening the cabinet under the sink gets him a spanking, or a timeout, or a yelling at, or a toy taken away, or gets him sent to his room. If he’s old enough, he might even realize that his parents don’t want him to open that cabinet. But he still doesn’t understand why. Without the “why”, the punishment becomes tyranny and the sought object even more desired. What’s so very important, and so often passed over, is that opening the cabinet under the sink is not bad. Not at all. We adults do it every day over and over and over again. There’s nothing bad about the things in that cabinet either. What is bad is performing certain actions with certain things that happen to be under there; like drinking from the dish detergent bottle. But teaching a child not to do that is much easier than teaching a child not to open the cabinet in the first place for one reason: we don’t do it either. Ultimately, children want only to be like us, to do what we do, to learn what we know, and to explore their world with that knowledge.

This leads to the second key aspect of how I raise children. I let them do what I do. My daughter has an entire playroom full of every type of toy you can imagine. She has a table in the dining room covered with craft supplies. She has buckets and baskets of even more things to play with in the living room. And yet, every evening when I’m making dinner what she wants most, despite all those things, is to stand next to me and help. She wants to put the onions in the pot. She wants to pinch the salt. She wants to measure the flour. Every time I get out a broom, she runs as fast as she can to her playroom to get her own “sweeper” and she follows me around hitting all the important spots. When I’m doing something that isn’t active or interesting, then she turns to her toys for entertainment. And when she does, she usually wants me to play with them too.

Closely related to this, I don’t expect them to do anything I wouldn’t do. If I leave the kitchen a mess, then I’m not really setting an example that encourages them to pick up their blocks. If I don’t brush my teeth every night, how can I expect them to think it’s important when I ask them to? If I don’t refrain from saying “bad words”, then why should they get the soap when they utter these words?

Sure, there’s the whole “I’m the adult and your the kid and I get to do adult things that you can’t do” thing. But, aside from some societal constraints and a few safety issues, in my eyes anything that actually belongs on that list is something a child physically can’t do or wouldn’t want to. Some parents may wish to make a longer list than is needed but, in the end, each additional item is only a new source of stress for the child and, ultimately, the parent.

This applies to everything. Really, everything. The meals I cook are the same meals I feed my daughter. I don’t expect her to eat kale if I’m not, and I don’t expect to be able to eat ice cream if I’m not going to give her some if she asks for it. I don’t expect her to go to sleep just because it’s “bed time”. When I go to sleep, she goes to sleep. If I want her in bed at 8pm, then I go to bed at 8pm. Sometimes I get out of bed after she falls asleep. Sometimes we don’t go to bed until 11pm. I almost always get up before she does. Sometimes she asks to go to bed before I’m ready to which is certainly okay. There are always exceptions. And sometimes, a certain situation calls for a change in routine. But the changes are easy to deal with when we can explain why and when a child can learn what to expect.

In fact, managing expectations is critical. Which things are important to have done in a home is different for every household. Some bedtimes are rigid. For others, the wake up times are more important. For some, both ends are flexible. When I need a child to understand how important something is or what to expect next, I make it part of our rhythm.

We humans are built on rhythms. Our hearts beat. Our lungs expand and contract. Our eyes blink. The sun rises and falls each day, the moon cycles each month, the seasons change through each year. It’s part of our nature. From meals, to cleaning up, to who we visit, to which stories we tell, to when we go to sleep, the more of life that we can build into a structured rhythm the easier it will be for children to understand what comes next. They will begin to expect the next event and look forward to it, no matter how mundane it may seem. And when we have an opportunity to break that cycle, it becomes a treat. Just think of how excited we get over a Solar Eclipse when, really, is a sunset any less beautiful?

Speaking of expectations, it’s important that I always honor my word. For instance, if a child asks for something and I ask him to wait, I do everything I can to remember his request and fulfill it when I said I would. Doing so brings him peace and understanding that you will do what you say you will do and that they need only ask once. Not doing so, makes something as simple as a toddler asking for a cracker turn into a constant barrage of “can I have a cracker” until the item is provided, sometimes resulting in tears if the request is not filled right away. If something should happen and I can’t honor my word, I don’t try to hide behind it or hope the child has forgotten. I explain to him why it can’t be done. I never use “we’ll do it later” as a way to avoid saying “no”.

I could go on and on and on. But these five things really set the foundation for everything else. Maybe I just got really lucky. Maybe there are worse times to come. Maybe I’ll be cursing these very words in less than a year. But, as it stands now, my daughter is a very good, very kind, very well behaved child. She listens well. She’s very smart. She plays very well by herself and with others. She plays alone when I need her to. Due to my circumstances, I have no choice but to put my daughter in daycare. However, her teachers constantly mention how smart she is, how well behaved she is, and how they’d love to have an entire class full of kids like her.

The only real difficulty I have is more an aspect of our society and my situation than my parenting style. With such a close relationship with my daughter, she’s quite attached to me. This means that she’s reluctant to spend any time with people she’s not close to. Especially if she’s expected to do so without me around. So leaving her with a random baby sitter would simply not work. She’s only happy with people she’s comfortable with and the longer she’s expected to stay with them the more comfortable she needs to be with them. Since our society tends to exist in tiny, lonely bubbles of themselves with only the occasional mingling with other groups, getting her regular exposure to other people can be difficult. However, I am slowly, happily building our village around us. And with each new connection my daughter makes, the next connection comes even easier.