There are so many reasons to be critical of our society and the expectations surrounding raising children but I’m only going to tackle one of them this time and on a pretty basic level…individual pursuits vs. collective good.
To be raised in a western culture is to want what I want and even demand it as a right (whether it's the house, the car, traveling…). Individualism at its peak. Our culture is designed to make it really hard to have children. No wait, relatively easy and expected to have children but very hard to raise them. Being a parent to young children is not about me, first and foremost, no matter how much I'd like to say so. I have to take care of myself of course and I take advantage of all the personal pursuits that I can BUT I am not number one right now. Two little beings depend on me for their lives, literally at this point, and that can't be denied. Enter stress. Nobody wants to admit that they are not in full control of every decision at every moment. It's not compatible with our training.
To me, being a mom is about compromises - a dirty word by our standards but that's a shame. It's possible to be really happy with the decisions you make out of compromise, but they require a lot more effort and creativity. Compromise is how you arrive at win/win situations, right? Anyone in management knows that in principle at least. Of course it's all easier when there's only one point of view, but barring that, you either dictate an option that screws someone else, or you find something in the middle that's acceptable to both parties (in our case, the parents and kids). Yes you lose part of what you wanted in the first place but that means someone else got part of what they wanted. A shift into the mindset of collective good rather than rugged individualism. Unfortunately this is extremely devalued in our culture - compromise viewed as a cop out or weakness, rather than a valuable way of solving problems.
3 comments:
This is awesome! I totally believe in what you've written and something that Jeremy said ages ago will stick with me. "Whatever works!" Our parenting style has slowly gone toward that and now we're more into the compromise stage as it's a little hard reasoning with a two-year-old!
We still go with "whatever works" within reason of course. Two years old is a particularly challenging time to try to be reasoning, as we learned the hard way. There seems to be a lot more language at three, but the ability to reason hasn't kept up with the vocabulary as far as we can tell.
I'd love to see the little guy again!
Oh yeah, definitely within reason! Can you picture your household if you didn't go within reason? I can just imagine all our walls and furniture covered in crayon marks, the kitten would be dead from lack of O2, and Zach would be eating Goldfish crackers and cereal bars for all his meals -- LOL!
I'm glad to hear that things will improve once he hits three-ish. At least I'm hoping his verbal skills will improve so the screeching will stop and the polite asking will come back into vogue!
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