| | | | Free Parenting Advice for Those Who Mess Things Up |
By Glenn A. Hascall
For ten glorious years my wife and I celebrated marriage without children. We share in the joy of mutual satisfaction in a life unhindered by tiny feet.
We would spontaneously pack up a couple of suitcases and head on down the road to another state for another adventure without warning.
Sure, we would eventually have children, but this was our time to enjoy life and learn about what it takes to be a parent.
We amassed a significant collection of parenting books. We would listen to audio tapes and take notes from well known experts in parenting. We began to distribute free parenting advice to those who seemed to be messing things up. We devised a mental checklist that would enable us to come to some rather startling conclusions about the parenting ability of most of the people we knew.
Then in the spring of 1995 our daughter was born and we set about immediately to parent our daughter in a manner that befitted 'revised and updated material' status for the books we had read. We were going to be perfect parents if ever there was such a thing. You see, we had the books – and we had read them.
Little by little a dread realization struck us – our daughter did not react the way the book indicated she should. We didn't even react the way said we were supposed to. We found ourselves blowing the "Perfect Parent Guidelines".
We had wanted to be such good parents and we had struggled long and hard to understand and implement the great ideas on parenting, yet we were blowing it consistently.
We realized that we really should go back to the parents we gave advice to and apologize.
Parenting is hard work and not for the weak-willed.
Most experts are providing details on parenting from either their own unique perspective or based on a sample testing group that would be different from any other testing group known to man.
Essentially we were responding to our children in the very same way the authors of other books responded to their children. We just didn't take the time to learn who our children were and how they responded to the world around them.
Sometimes they responded the way we thought they would and other times the experts provided little in the way of understanding our children.
I absolutely love being a parent and I am grateful for the opportunity to enjoy the discovery of who my children are so I can help them learn who they are going to become.
Maybe one day I'll write a book.
Post a comment
FamilyLobby.com Articles is your source for family-related articles. Talk about this article in the FamilyLobby Community.
|
|
|
|
|
StumbleUpon
