Parenting: Doing the best we can

Happy New Year!

When the kids go back to school it’s for all intents and purposes a new year. The weather has been changing, brisk mornings and evenings come as dawn and dusk squeeze the day.

As the summer holiday drew to a close, the lax bed times and loosened rules made for some haywire kids in our house.

We got to a new level of exasperation. Parenting. Nobody prepared me for this. There is no readily-accessible course in how to be a great parent. It’s a life-long crash course in learning on the go. It is an important thing to get right. Our choices to apply pressure or increase space, establish discipline and structure, succumb to the emotion or bite the tongue is just a roll of the dice really.

I think it might be better if we all lived in multi-generational housing. Grandparents at least have a little experience and make for great teachers. As it stands right now, there are times I feel we are really experimenting with fragile and vulnerable little people.

Thankfully I think we’ve got great kids and we have done a good job to date raising well-adjusted, kind, compassionate and loving little people. I see the smiles they put on people’s faces. I hear their wit and their wisdom.

Best practices…

However, I’m afraid. Perhaps it’s that tension that keeps me focussed on improving the outcomes day in and day out. The world they are growing up in is not the world I grew up in. So much has changed. The photos of my childhood are in a box full of albums at my sisters house, my kids are on Instagram and Facebook. Our phone was stuck to a wall, a mobile phone in my childhood was the 25ft cable that allowed me to drag it into my room. Social isolation, fentanyl, vaping, climate change… Are we preparing our children to be resilient, good decision-makers?

Some of the old techniques that helped me get to sleep at night like the trusty old “daddy’s-shirt” worked wonders for a couple of night’s in a row now with my kids so we are not totally lost. I’m thankful our schools are open (for now) and that we’ve started another New Year.

I know there are a whole lot of parents out there who have as many questions as we do and who work hard everyday to raise the best little kidlets as they can. My thoughts are with you! Enjoy them because before you know it they will be looking after you.