What does parenting have to do with politics?

It has been a really negative year for everyone politically, you can't even turn on the news without seeing more negativity. Fighting and name calling are becoming par for the course. Our own government is acting more like a class of preschoolers than a leadership body made up of mature adults. Not just one party, but both are playing the "I don't like you, so you can't come to my birthday party" game.
  

I used to joke that maturity was overrated, but a little bit of maturity wouldn't hurt any of us right now. If you have a truth to speak then by all means speak it, but the minute we resort to including personal attacks and name calling we can no longer consider ourselves responsible adults.

One of my favorite parenting experts is a woman named Susan Stiffelman. She calls her parenting approach Passionate Parenting. She has taught me the futility of power struggles. The more you seek to control another person, the more they resist that control, and the faster you lose the control you seek. 

 

Perhaps she should expand her book to explain that this applies to every situation, not just our own children. We can all share our views as loudly and even as aggressively as possible, but when we shut them out before they even get a chance to hear it, what is the point of saying it at all?

It has been a year since I made the commitment to remain positive no matter what the situation. I picked a bad year to do it, and as hard as I have tried I still have a very long way to go. Along the way I have had to cut out a lot of activities, going to my much loved locals-only site is just one of those things. Not because anyone there has been unkind to me or attacked me in any way, but because the negativity is not only a physical but an emotional drain.

Those who teach positive living say that it takes five positives to counteract a single negative. If so, then the cloud of negativity hanging over this country is going to take centuries to conquer. Those same experts also teach that we should not focus on what we don't have, but what we do have. Instead of focusing on what is going wrong, we are supposed to focus on what is right. I'm not saying that it is a bad thing to speak your mind or to disagree with what is going on in the government right now. I'm just saying before you complain, see if you can find a way to turn that complaint into positive action.

One thing I have always stressed to my children is that bitching has never solved a single problem. Instead of focusing on the problem, focus first on the lessons we can learn from it and then focus on finding the solution. My children understand this concept, but so few adults seem to these days. Even my children know that smart people use their brains, and the rest resort to calling names. 

 

What are we teaching our children right now? That is is better to hate than to love? That it is better to complain that to take action? That it is okay to call other people names as long as you don't like them? That anyone who does not agree with you is the enemy?

Children do learn these lessons whether we mean to teach them or not, and it might seem okay to teach them to attack that which they do not like but... there will be times in every child's life when they do not like us. When those lessons come back to us, they sometimes hurt.

One area of our life affects every other. If we insist we are teaching our children respect but can't offer respect to our neighbor or even our president, then we aren't teaching them respect at all. We are teaching them to hate, and we really have no right to be surprised when that hate comes back home. Teach them love and compassion. Teach them to speak their truth respectfully. Teach them to create, not to destroy.

Being the Adult

We shouldn’t blow up at our children. There is no excuse for an adult allowing themselves to be placed in a position where a full on screaming match follows, because the minute we find ourselves yelling at our child... we have already lost the battle.

When it gets to the point of raised voices, the rule is we always walk away. We think it over, we try to look at both sides, and when we have calmed down we discuss the solution. That's what has always worked for our family in the past. We walk away until we can all be rational. Sometimes that takes minutes, sometimes that takes days. But we deal with it when the time has come to deal with it, and not before.

We, the adults remain in control. We call it off when it starts to go over. We are the representatives of reason, the force of rationality, the voice of experience.

So how is it that I ended up standing in the driveway screaming at the top of my lungs at my almost-eighteen-year-old daughter, Brooke?

Sometimes we know exactly what we are supposed to do as parents, but something in our wiring just flips. We get pushed too far. Wrong place, really wrong time. A bad day is still following us around. I don't yell at my kids often, even they will tell you it is really rare to see mommy lose it and when I do it is usually in their defense.

After we had talked it out she told me she knew I just needed to blow off steam. I'm glad that we have that solid of a relationship, that it could be fixed so quickly. I am very sorry for losing it, and she is right. Some of it was frustration with her... most of it was frustration with a lot of other people.

Things have been crazy around here this past year and a half. We've taken on more and more responsibility and had less and less time as a family. Having a strong family is important to all of us. I had to step back and remind myself that my goal as a parent is not to control them but to teach them how to control themselves.

We don't have a whole lot of time left to enjoy the mother-child bond that we have now. Very soon, she will be an adult in her own right. Our bond will always be there, but it will change when her focus changes.Becoming a wife. Becoming a mother. These things are only a few years away now.

I don't want to spend what time we have left destroying what we have built. I want to spend it building a new relationship. A relationship of equality.
 
Sometimes, we make mistakes. I should have ended the conversation before it got to that point. She knows she shouldn't have said the things she did. Apologies can go a long way when they are sincere.

What you feed grows, what you starve dies...

One of my nick-names as a child was “brat-brat,” it wasn’t said in anger, or in an attempt to insult, but it is something I swore I would never do to my children.

We have a lot of labels for our children. The smart one, the funny one, the troublemaker. It is really amazing how often they live up to those labels. The liar, the thief, the lazy one. Like they are somehow being reinforced by some unknown force. The slut, the junkie, the failure. Those labels have a way of following them throughout their lifetimes.

I would like to think that no parent would willingly label their child a slut, but believe it or not I’ve seen it happen more than once. When I was a teenager a mother I was acquainted with saw her two girls walking towards her, not yet teens, not even tweens, she looked up and greeted them. “There are my little sluts.” My jaw dropped but I didn’t know what to say.

And then there was the little boy who told me that his father had informed him that he already knew his son would grow up to be a junkie. The boy wasn’t even a teenager yet, and he doesn’t do drugs yet either. What the hell was running through this fathers mind when he said this to his own child is beyond me.

I told him that he was better than that. His dad was not the one that would make that decision. His dad was not the one who led his life. His dad had no right to say that to him. I still wonder though, whose words were stronger the words of a friend or the words of a father? Which will he remember the first time someone offers him drugs?

Our children trust us beyond a doubt. Each of those children I have mentioned also love and respect their parents very much. They want to please them, even if it means living up to those labels that have been placed upon them. Every child longs to live up to their parents expectations.

Saying something one time probably isn’t going to program their open little brains, but if we say it enough we burn an image into their brain. This is who you are. This is who you have always been. This is who you will always be.

Instead of reinforcing those negative images in their wide open little brains, I want to input positive images. When I call my youngest my little fiddle player, and my son my tech geek I am consciously turning them towards their more positive traits. When I compliment my oldest on her rationality and her strong sense of responsibility I am telling her I want to see more of THAT.

Some have assumed that my complimenting my children instead of criticizing was due to parental blindness. That I think my children are perfect. They aren’t. I am aware of those qualities that most parents see as negatives. I just don’t see the point in pushing them towards the negative when the positive traits are the ones I want to see grow.

What you feed grows, what you starve dies...

Or maybe that’s just me...