Eclectic parenting

I was talking to my dad recently and he told me that he and my mom had never really talked about what sort of parents they wanted to be when my brother and I were born (which explains a lot since he and my mother were rarely on the same page when it came to parenting). It’s funny, because I think about it all the time. I wonder if it’s a generational thing, because I know that most of my friends thought a lot about their parenting style before having kids. I know a number of people who are big-time adherents to attachment parenting. While I’m glad it’s working for them, it doesn’t quite fit with my own feelings about childrearing. Were I to put myself in a box, I’d say that I support more of a classical authoritative/democratic style of parenting, with clear limits/rules/consequences set, but with the goal of allowing children to make their own choices and become more independent. Fortunately, Adam and I see eye-to-eye on this issue, so I don’t think we’ll be battling each other over whether to use time-outs and rewards when the time comes.

I used to be a child and family therapist and dealt with a lot of families where parenting style (or lack thereof) was the biggest problem. Of course that’s not what they’d initially come to me for, but more often than not, fixing their parenting style was the solution (of course, I did have clients who were truly mentally ill, but so many of them weren’t and really didn’t need to be on meds). I’d hear these stories from parents that their child or children are out of control. When I’d ask about discipline there would either be none or it was all emotionally based (screaming, spanking, etc.). Frequently, when I’d visit them in school, I’d hear from the teachers that the kids were doing well. More often than not, the kids were reacting positively to the structure at school and negatively to the lack of structure at home. When the parents were willing to try new ways of parenting (rather than requesting that I wave my magic wand and “fix” their child), there were usually good results. I remember working with a mom who’d been a victim of domestic violence (and felt extremely depressed and hopeless) to implement the 1-2-3 Magic program with her three sons. It was amazing how much her children’s behavior had changed in just a month, and also, how empowered she felt by having the tools to better manage their behavior. It was hard initially, because she wanted her kids to like her and imposing limits pissed them off, but it was worth that painful early effort in the long-run.

I grew up in a home without a lot of structured discipline and, from what I’ve been told and what I remember, I was very independent and a boundary-pusher. Boundary-pushers need to be confronted with consistency and limits so they can learn to regulate their own behavior. Most kids crave those limits and that structure, even if they don’t know it. This is why I did so well in school — because the rules, consequences and rewards were always extremely clear. I never got in trouble there because I could always see what it would take to get into trouble and would studiously avoid crossing that line. At home, I pushed and pushed because there were no clear boundaries. Sometimes I’d get punished for something while another time I would just get yelled at. Sometimes, I’d get punished and then let off shortly afterward, making the punishment rather pointless in terms of teaching me not to do the same thing again.

I’m not saying my parents did it all wrong. My brother and I are both successful in our chosen fields and in our personal lives, so it’s not as if their way of parenting left us scarred for life. They did a lot of great things that I certainly plan to incorporate into the way I parent. The first and most important thing they did was to read to us from Day 1. Almost all of my earliest childhood memories involve books. I can remember my brother and me laying on my parent’s bed for hours at a time while my mom read Tom Sawyer to us. They instilled in me a love of the written word. My parents also encouraged our creativity in so many different ways — from providing clothes for playing dress-up, to providing a video camera for us to make movies, to attending all of our recitals (both at school and the ones we created at home ourselves), to getting us lessons in whatever creative endeavor we were interested in at the time. With their encouragement, I was writing creatively outside of school by the age of 6 (at which time I remember writing a song which was to be sung by Jem and the Holograms! I believe it was called “Kissing in the Sheets” — ok I was precocious!). Also, when I was a teenager, my parents didn’t play the over-protective card. They let me make my own choices and my own mistakes. And I made plenty of mistakes. But, by the time I went to college, I had a pretty good head on my shoulders and avoided a lot of the mistakes friends of mine were making. Many of my friends who’d been really reigned in by their parents during high school went absolutely wild in college because they’d never had any freedom. I’m a big believer that teens who are trusted by their parents are more likely to do the right thing because of that trust. When someone believes in you, you want to prove them right.

But the reality is that I’ll need to tailor my approach to my child. Will he be uber-independent like I was or a “momma’s boy” like my little brother was? If I have a child like myself, I’ll need to work a lot more on setting boundaries and having consistent positive and negative consequences for behaviors. If I have a child like my brother, I’ll need to do a lot more encouraging of his independence, helping him to make his own good choices and not rely on me and Adam so much. If my child doesn’t look to me for guidance in everything he does, I’ll know I’ve done a good job. It’s nice to be needed, and of course a baby needs their parents completely, but I hope to encourage my child to be his own man and make smart decisions for the rest of his life.

More important than anything else is for my child to grow up in an environment full of love, and that’s pretty easy when I’m married to someone I’m even more crazy about now than I was when I first fell in love with him six years ago. My parents fought all the time when I was growing up and it definitely impacted me and my brother negatively. Sometimes people stay in bad marriages “for the kids”, but I don’t believe that children can grow up as healthy if their parents are not happy. I want to raise my child to know what a healthy, loving, affectionate relationship looks like so that he can one day be a great husband himself.

I think you can have all of these ideas set in your head about what sort of a parent you want to be, but the most important thing you can be is flexible and tailor your approach to the child you have (still knowing what sorts of things you want to encourage in your child). When I was a therapist, I never used one treatment model with every client I had. I was always eclectic, tailoring my approach to the individual, their situation and their goals. You can’t decide how to treat someone before you even know them, and I think it’s the case with kids too. So, while I’m glad I’ve given more thought to this than my parents did 31 years ago, I’m definitely ready to be the sort of parent my child needs, whatever that may mean.