Being a parent is tough. Children come in all different shapes and sizes – both physically and mentally – and there is no one size fits all approach to parenting them.
You only need to look at the hundreds of different parenting books telling you how to bring up your child to realise that no-one has the one perfect method. By the end of your trek through the Amazon backlist of books from Miriam Stoppard to Dr Spock, via What to Expect, Super Nanny, the Little Book of Sleep, Attachment Parenting, crying it out, Helicopter Parenting, being a Tiger Mum and five thousand different approaches in between, you are guaranteed to feel like a total useless lump with no idea what you are doing. But guess what… it’s all rubbish. The truth is that all kids are different and a lot of the time, as a parent and often as a practitioner, we are just fumbling our way through the dark trying to find the little chinks of light that will lead us to a clue about what will work with each child. There is no map because all of the chinks are in different places because every child is unique. I have three children. The two eldest have had an almost identical upbringing with the only variable being that they are the oldest/youngest sibling in the equation. They were brought up to the age of 7 and 9 by two very loving and devoted parents who never fought and spent a lot of time with them when work and school were not in the way. They still have two very loving parents but they also have a very loving step-dad and a very loving partner of dad in the equation. They also see their grandparents regularly who have been as involved in bringing them up as I have. Apart from a terrible couple of tough years they have lived a charmed life. They both had the same input, went to the same school, had the same teachers, had the same discipline (intrigued by Supernanny when she first graced our TVs we gave the dreaded and offensively named ‘Naughty Step’ a go. The eldest child responded well to this but the youngest just shouted ‘I don’t care’ and peeled the wallpaper off as he waited for his designated ‘1 minute per year of his life’ then went back and did the thing that got him there all over again. The point I am making is that these boys had exactly the same upbringing but they couldn’t be more different. One is very thoughtful, caring, a logical thinker, giving and sensible. He will work hard and make someone a wonderful husband and father one day. The other is quick, sarcastic, loving and a little mercenary. He will probably make a lot of money one day. I can only hope it will be through invention or innovation and not through white collar crime. My youngest – well he is a different case altogether but then he has had a different upbringing to his older brothers. So how did they become so different? By being human of course. None of us are the same. There is no one parenting approach that results in the perfectly adjusted child that thinks in a uniform way. There is nothing we can do to build all children into the same thinkers and why should we? My mum says that if only people would listen to and learn from the generations before them as they are growing up then we would be able to learn from their mistakes and avoid making them. We would evolve generation by generation and have happy lives with no debt and wonderful relationships and careers. Hindsight is 20/20 vision. But we don’t, that isn’t human nature at all. Once children reach a certain age they begin to think that maybe their parents just don’t understand the modern world at all and their advice can’t be valid. So the best thing we can do, if we can’t pass down that knowledge, is to create good thinkers so that they can come up with the best solutions themselves. Children who will become adults that are creative, critical, collaborative and caring. The 4Cs. So maybe I will try a P4C approach to parenting. Wish me luck!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
AuthorMiss Magical Mess is a pre-school teacher and P4C Level 2B facilitator. After a shaky start as a P4C facilitator (P4C with 3 year olds... are you kidding?) Miss Magical Mess created her own approach to P4C and enquiry model and is now a big fan. Archives |