I know that parents are the most important teachers, whether we like it or not, so it’s on me to pass these values along. But, I will be honest, I bristle at the notion of making up a community service project and “doing it,” rather than living as someone who serves my community.  What I really want to teach my children  is to become people who see being of service as part of their daily lives.   Recently, a neighbor’s experience crystallized things for me. . .

Last week, my neighbor, with whom my children and I interact frequently, confided in me that her two year old son has been diagnosed with PDD, which is on the autism spectrum. It was such a revelation. Suddenly—and if you are a parent with a child who finally got the right diagnosis, you understand—so much made sense. What an odd mixture of feelings I felt from her and for her: relief at understanding her son’s behaviors, fear about what this would mean for her and his life, questions like “What do we do now?” and “How can we help?

I teach and want to focus on the positive, so I stopped right there. In the midst of all the other emotions, I feel a tiny bit grateful to have been offered the opportunity to authentically serve our community, and teach my children while I am at it. How can we help best? Intending to find out, I’ve asked my neighbor to invite me AND MY CHILDREN (who interact with her son regularly) to the next home meeting with their therapists and advisors. There, together, as a community, we will learn how to help this little boy and his parents.

How to be of service to the community is one of the most important life skills you can teach your children. And believe me when I say that the experiences that result will be among the most enjoyable and fulfilling that you and your child have together. Absolutely everybody wins! As you look for a meaningful community service outlet for your children, please consider:

1) What will your child authentically connect to? There are literally thousands of ways to be of service—maybe it’s working with animals, caring for the sick and disabled, raising money a cause, or using technology to raise awareness.

2) Who needs help that is near by? Trying looking for things you can do “locally.” This will allow your child to see the positive results of his or her efforts, reinforcing the values you are trying to instill.

3) Will you join in yourself? Your children are learning everything from watching you, and, for good or for bad, kids do what their parents DO, not what they say or teach.

Happy helping!

Laurie

Owner, Partners With Parents

Interestingly enough, the other parents who I have chosen to spend most of my time with are not quite so permissive.  Most of the time we can see eye to eye.  It’s not so hard when we’re outdoors (It’s not like I let my son run in the street or anything), but when we’re in one of our homes, it can be a bit more tricky.  Do I tell my son that it’s okay to bang or climb the furniture or walk around with spatula in hand and bucket on head in our home but not in others?  You bet.  Do I spend a lot of time deflecting what is perceived as “bad behavior?”  You bet.  Is it worth it?  You bet.  Do I think that my son gets it now?  If he did, he’d be a truly astounding 18-month old.  But, I live with the hope that my consistent inconsistency will make sense to him in the future.  Let’s not forget that one of the best principles that we can teach our children, and for that matter, live by ourselves, is respect for others’ ideas and practices.  It is not easy to tell our children no, especially when we secretly think they are right, but it is important to do so when they are violating another household’s rules.  I have the task of teaching my son that he will experience many different sets of rules and that part of functioning in society is understanding when and how to act in different situations.

I remember from my own childhood having to grapple with the same inconsistencies and carrying around resentment for the conflicting rules.  My parents were not so much about the “why,” but more about the “do.”   I am thankful that my son is growing up in an era where explaining things to your child is looked upon as a matter of course.  I will, unlike my own parents, carefully explain why certain behavior is correct in different situations, instead of telling him, “That’s just how it is.”  But I firmly believe that in the end I will, like my parents before me, successfully instill (with a few embarrassing moments for all, of course) the necessary understanding of social graces and respect for others that will get him labeled “such a good child.”  After all, we do not live just in our own homes, but ever increasingly as citizens of “the world.”  Let us equip our children to do the same—but maybe still also get the thrill of throwing the football in the house with Dad on a fun Sunday morning.

-An “Underprotective”  NYC Parent

Of course, it’s laughable when the robber claims “Mine!” about the goods in question, but it represents a crucial first step toward articulate self-expression and negotiation.  We want to coax our kids out of their adversarial stance into something a little more humane, urbane, and, well, sane.  “Mine!” is the simplest articulation of wanting, and a critical step in the progression toward “Me too!”, “Can I have a turn?”, or, best yet, “Let me know when you’re done with that, okay?”  We all know what it’s like to want something and it’s our job as grown-ups to help our children use language to get it.  They must view language as the means to express what they want and negotiate procuring it in light of what others want.

Encourage your toddler to speak as the means to resolve conflicts.  Give them opportunities to express what they are feeling.  Don’t be tempted to steer children off to some other distraction without getting to say what they have to say.  But also teach them that just because they want it doesn’t mean they are going to get it, or at least right now.  Above all, they need to see you model the right way to conduct themselves in interpersonal interactions.  Otherwise, they might model themselves after what they see on Jerry Springer or in Congress.

If you’ve had occasion to muddle through the early stages of speech development with a child of your own, or even a niece, cousin, or friend’s child, you’re very familiar with that frustrating moment when you know that they are earnestly talking to you, but you have no idea what they are saying.  “Throw me a bone, here, kid.  At least give me one word clearly!”

It’s all very cute, of course; how else would we ever get to have “hawk-dahs” and “noonoos” for lunch, or end up with nicknames like “Cashy?”  The grinding of the gears occurs when we are working with these little people in genuine partnership but the rope-bridge they’re extending across the chasm of communication just doesn’t quite reach this side.

Haven’t you made eye contact with a toddler who sincerely tells you, “Goby junkinow mizhou” and then expects you to respond, or to do something?

“Uh, get the cabinet tissue?”

The worst is when they nod, emphatically, when you repeat back something ridiculous.  “Go buy junk, now I miss you?”

“Mm-Hmm!”  You figured it out . . . great.

The important thing to remember is that like every other learning process, repetition is paramount in language acquisition.  Trying though it may be, especially when emotions are running high or time is of the essence, we have to slow ourselves down and encourage our smallest children to express themselves verbally.  It comes in stages – from vocalization of sounds to words to sentences to treatises on your parental inadequacies.   Throughout, we must affirm their attempts to communicate and try to understand what is being said.  When we succeed (albeit infrequently at first), we can model it back correctly.

No matter what, we can reinforce the value of what they are offering.  That way, they learn to speak and develop a voice.  When you respond to your little cherub like what he is saying matters, he not only learns to speak, but also to speak up and be heard.  Now that’s a lesson worth repeating.

Processing death is a little different from our other parental duties and the regualar disruptions to our familial stases.  It’s a bit richer, as parenting challenges go, existing as it does at a confluence of emotional and spiritual avenues of unparalleled magnitude.  Bring together a touch of gut-wrenching sorrow, add some deep-seated fear of the unknowable, shake them together with even mildly differing parenting inclinations, and you’ve got quite a paralyzing cocktail.  It’s no wonder wincing parents want to sidestep the issue of death, for the sake of their own comfort and that of their young ones.  It’s awkward, challenging material, which for many of us is worse than simple sadness.  We just don’t know the truth about death, and we don’t want to mess this up.

You would think that given the frequency and inevitability of death we might all be sharing a clearer pool of collective wisdom on presenting it to our children.  Part of the confusion, the hesitation, we experience when confronted by these dicey topics in our children’s rapidly changing lives is that the windows of application are so brief.  I’m only going to have to deal with a major first-love scenario once for each of my two daughters, right?  You talk to a preschooler differently from an elementary-age kid about a new pregnancy in the family, right?  The landscape of child development changes so dramatically and so rapidly, we are left with only our instincts and reflexes to guide us through perpetually uncharted territory.  And then, of course, there’s the fact that none of us actually knows anything about this topic, the far side of death.

Adding to the complexity of death’s presence in our lives, the collective American marketplace is not much for pain and sorrow.  Our beauty-failures receive their fair share of advertisers’ attention, but for the most part we are informed that we are good enough, that we “deserve a break today,” and “why ask why?”  We have innumerable opportunities to consume products that will make us more “happy,” or at least numb our discomfort.  So pervasive are these pathways to happiness, that we can experience an acute sense of failure if our children are not happy – if their “needs” are not met, even for a moment. “Quick, get a toy!  No, honey, get one that makes noises!”  Confronting death is just hard emotional work, without the quick fixes we see portrayed in the world around us.

On occasion when I’m out with my kids on the street and one of them happens to be crying because she didn’t get the color gumball she had her heart set on or she smashed her finger, strangers will approach her and say things like “Don’t cry.  You’re so young.  You should be happy.”  That’s a pressure, and a false way of living, that I don’t want my kids to have to manage.  Life, even for a child, isn’t just joy joy joy, and if a person can’t bear for a child to feel some sadness or disappointment in life then it’s for that person’s own sake, not the child’s.  Our overprotection cripples our kids, not helps them.  They are young humans, and to grow up to be well-sorted older humans they need to have real experiences and to have age appropriate answers to difficult questions so they can get to know their feelings.  The answer to their sadness is not to eat a “happy” meal.  Their sadness IS the very encouraging answer to the question “Are you alive and perceiving?”

Death remains a part of every single life cycle, regardless of its duration. Just as it’s important to allow our growing toddlers experiences with balancing and falling down to build their resilience, insight, and coordination, they need to practice experiencing the complexity of empathy, rage, and grief.  So, get your kid a pet if you’re willing – he needs the practice. Our pets give our children small, meaningful doses of death practice in a world in which our technologies have limited the omnipresence of death and pushed it to the periphery.   Only a few decades ago, even in our rapidly advancing American society, fairly rarely did anyone reach adulthood without losing a sibling, or at least a cousin.  So, thanks, pets, for being there for our emotional enrichment, and doing the dirty work.

Most important, honestly tell your kid the mix of thoughts and feelings YOU experience when death presents itself–he needs the modeling.  When we experience death and loss, it is a sad, uncomfortable time for us.  Let’s not pretend to our children that we are “fine,” or that our families never have to visit the stone forest, or that this important, quiet place does not exist.  Just as having children gives rise to the exhilarating status “with” that defines our lives, death and loss gives birth to the inevitable status “without” to define them as well.  Let’s prepare our children for that, and lead them through the process genuinely.  How dishonest it would be never to acknowledge the hope and expectation each of us parents carries soberly, silently within us: long before our children pass on, we want go take our places in the stone forest first, leaving them to grieve and carry on without us there to guide them.

Our first instinct is to overprotect them.  Obviously, we are ethically obligated to feed and shelter our children, not to mention treat them with a certain amount of kindness.  By extension, doesn’t that mean we must do everything in our power to ensure that their feet never touch sand that’s too hot, and their words never fall short of a college entrance board’s standards?  We’re supposed to shield them from the pains and disappointments they will no doubt face as they grow, right?

Well, no.   We know that trial and error is a critical element of any learning process.  We put the kids on teams so they can experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.  We know their lives will be filled with more romantic relationships that end in misery than will work out, but we send them off into the hormonal mosh-pit of schools nevertheless.  We know they must learn to fend for themselves.

We all have seen the results of oblivious parenting that allows self-destruction to run unchecked.  And we’ve seen overprotective parenting that prevents ease and true self-reliance from being developed and asserted.   Finding the line between protecting and guiding, on the one hand, and stifling and inhibiting on the other, is a game of trial and error itself.  Each parent and child must find ways to communicate with each other.   Parents must make their expectations clear and follow through consistently, while maintaining a context of love and support.  Children must be able to express their fears, make mistakes and know that they have a safe environment to grow and develop.

Complicating the situation is that just as our adolescents’ capacity for decision-making and self-management is swinging into high gear, their capacity for significant crashes picks up right along with it–romances ending in heartbreak, indelible marks on academic transcripts, social ostracism, and the like.  Couple this with the fact that teens tend to resist whatever measures we take in their predictable process of identity formation and individuation, and we are navigating in murky waters.

My dad modeled a parenting technique with me that I will no doubt try when my children reach adolescence.  Whenever he felt he had to rein in my forays into recklessness, he would remind me that it was not me he didn’t trust, it was the rest of the teenage world around me.  Even then, I found that soothing, and I ran with the trust my parents DID grant me to make my own choices that, for the most part, gave them further reasons to trust me.  That said, when Dad imposed rules and limitations, he spoke with me clearly about where he was drawing a line and why, without robbing me of my own sense of dignity and volition.  And it was only negotiable when it was negotiable.

Ultimately, the message is this: If you want to help your kids grow to be independent, self-managing problem-solvers who will listen to your best advice, start practicing NOW – not because they need the practice, but because you do.  Bite your tongue as your little girl dresses herself with articles of clothing that you’d never combine, even though you worry she’ll be ridiculed.  Make that boy of yours order his own meals at restaurants, but have to live with his choices.  If she can give good reasons, let her register for a class she believes is right for her, even though you feel it does not optimize her learning in these fleeting school years.  Let him delay registering for that major exam by one more administration because he just doesn’t feel ready yet–he might be right.  But for everyone’s sake, let your child know that, whoever is in the driver’s seat of a given choice, what you’re interested in most is not her performance, it’s her.