My Parenting Philosophy

This was written for a college class I'm taking and I'm considering submitting it for a scholarship. I welcome suggestions.

“Anyone who has children will understand, anyone who doesn’t, never will.”~Unknown

For many years, I adamantly didn’t want children. I had taken almost every available step to avoid children (except the obvious one), including looking into sterilization but found that I didn’t want to rule the option out in the future.

I had two reasons for this aversion; one was that I simply didn’t understand children and the second, even more relevant was because I was raised in an extremely abusive home. My parents divorced when I was ten, shortly after one of my grandmothers died. Not only was I sexually and physically abused by my father but I was neglected and abandoned by my mother and the remainder of my extended family who simply believed I was an out of control child. My parents made it perfectly clear I was a burden to them and got rid of me into the foster care system as soon as the opportunity arose.
In spite of this background, through my teenage years and adulthood, I refused to allow that to keep me from overcoming my childhood and fulfilling my dreams. I was determined I would never repeat my parents’ lives of despair, destitution, and alcoholism, and therefore, I would choose not to have children of my own. I lived in abject fear that I would be unable to prevent the cycle of abuse that had occurred in my life. Even so, I was too much of a realist and understood myself well enough that I knew I wasn’t going to be able to be completely celibate (at least not at that age – I’m wiser now). In a bizarre series of both fortunate and unfortunate events, I learned I was pregnant, and I knew my life would never be the same.

There wasn’t any doubt, when I was faced with the situation, as to how I would handle it. In fact, I felt relieved and a little elated. Now, even though I had taken reasonable precautions of birth control and to protect myself, the decision was out of my hands. I decided I would embrace this child as I had embraced other challenges – with complete belief in myself, hope, and all the love I could muster within myself. I would commit myself as best as I could to the task before me and for better or worse, give her everything I knew how to give, and what I didn’t know how to give, I would figure out as we went along. I was ill prepared, but I knew it, accepted it, and did my best to rise to the challenges before us both.

As time passed, I did. Her father quickly left after her birth but even before she was born I began to learn and grow into a person I didn’t know I was capable of being. My daughter, who I named Liberty (because I wished for her to be free of the demons, which haunted my life) became the single most blessing of my entire life. She gave my life a purpose and a meaning I didn’t know it lacked. She challenged me and forced me to look past myself and also at myself in different ways I never would have otherwise.

Over the last two years I’ve regularly asked myself what my role as a parent is and should be. I find the term ‘parent’ to be a much more fluid and evolving concept than I thought it would be. Oftentimes, I’ve asked that question in fear, apprehension, glee, and retrospection. Fear that I may have done something unintentional to harm my child when I acted in a way I felt was inappropriate or out of control for me. Or glee when I see her practice and succeed at a new skill I role-modeled for her.

To me, parenthood and being a mother, isn’t about controlling another being and subverting that person to your will as it was with my parents, but an ongoing exploration of the child’s potential, both realized and unrealized. From the minute Libby was born I had dreams for her – vague and shapeless – but dreams that she would be happy, healthy, and successful in ways that I had not been able to be when I was younger. I dreamed of her being free of abuse and knowing a pure, empowering love that only a mother could give. I dreamed of her pursuing her dreams, whatever they may be, and me being able to be there for her when she needed someone to help her along the way.

But in the process of all this, I learned even more about who I am as a person and how much more there is to life. I learned that part of being a parent is realizing and allowing yourself to be fallible, and human. I learned to say ‘I love you’ without hesitation or reservation to those I care about. I learned to delight in the little achievements, celebrate the big ones and move past failures large and small until I reached my goal. I have learned that guiding a child involves rising to your own utmost potential as much as it involves raising the child to that level and accepting with grace and courage if either of you fall short.

Guiding a child isn’t about what you want but more, what the child wants while taking into consideration what you want and know to be best for the child with regards to safety, health, and moral concerns. Giving a child the tools to survive life isn’t enough; you have to model how to enjoy life and to be happy with who you are. In a span of 20 short years you have to cram in the life lessons you’ve either learned or are learning in an effort to prepare the child as much as possible for the future, and a time when you may or may not be there to guide further. You have to accept that the child may not be able to learn the lessons at the time you’re teaching them and hope they learn them in time. But even once a child reaches adulthood, the task is far from over.

While the hardest part of all is acknowledging that every day you have to let a child go out on their own and allow him or her to experience life, it doesn’t stop once the child reaches adulthood. You have to let children fall down sometimes so that they know what it’s like and what it means to pick themselves up and be self-reliant. You have to let her try, even when it breaks your heart because you know she’s frustrated and it hurts her. You have to let go enough to allow experiences teach the lessons because sometimes we all have to learn the hard way. Guiding a child is about being there and knowing when to step aside.

The biggest example that I have of this lesson happened when Libby was about 11 months old and just starting to creep around the furniture. I was terribly protective of her, hovering nearby to catch her anytime she stumbled. One day a well-meaning acquaintance of mine said rather appropriately, “If you don’t let her fall, how is she ever going to learn to stand on her own?” I was so busy trying to protect her, I didn’t see I was handicapping her to make myself feel better. The next time I stood back and let her fall. The sound of her laughter was enough to make me laugh as well. From that point forward, she would routinely ‘fall’ just to see my reaction. Now when she falls down, if it doesn’t produce a scrape or pain, she just gets up and goes back to what she was doing and neither of us miss a beat. I hope that when life knocks her around a little that she’ll be able to employ the same tactic: get up, dust yourself off, and keep trying. And I’ve learned the same lesson myself when life knocks me down.

Of course, parenthood isn’t all about happy feelings and laughter either. There are times when my child challenges me in ways that aren’t quite so positive, like when she throws things after I’ve told her a hundred times not to, or she refuses to go to bed when she’s supposed to, or feeds the dog her dinner instead of eating it, or hitting others. Sometimes the things she does make me want to pull my hair out and scream at the ceiling because I’ve told her over and over a hundred times. I have to remind myself she’s two and doesn’t know any better. Sometimes discipline with a child is as much disciplining yourself as it is your child – making yourself stay calm and level-headed when you want to explode instead and to have reasonable expectations for where the child is developmentally. I don’t always understand why she does the thing she does but I try not to expect her to act as an adult would.

Discipline is also about finding alternatives to handling a situation, finding a middle ground that you can both live with. I’m still working on learning this one but I’m learning to pick my battles. If I tell my daughter to sit on the couch so I can put her shoes on and she plops down
on the floor instead, is she being disobedient? Or is she simply doing what I say without fully understanding it? Is she so eager to please me that she just sits? And is it her actions that annoy me or the fact that she didn’t do what I told her to exactly when and how I told her to? Sometimes our reactions to our children are more about us as parents than it is about the child. And it’s learning how to deal with that appropriately that is an important foundation of guiding and disciplining children. Without it we’re left as victims of our emotions and our children’s emotions.

Therefore, as part of that process of constant self-evaluation and retrospection, I’ve sought out resources for improving, keeping my mind open to alternatives while remembering that I know what’s best for my child. And as long as I keep that in mind, I hope I can’t go too far wrong.