Archive for the ‘Parenting’ Category

When you lose your cool…

When you lose your cool

…and it’s the holidays when you are not supposed to lose your cool!

So this happened. To me. Or rather, to my kids.

I snapped. Not just once, but a couple times already since they’ve been home. I don’t see myself this way—as a person who will “snap” and get testy or passive-aggressive when I’m under stress. I see myself in this idealized view—that I have patience and perspective, that I can say what I need directly, without using shame or manipulation to get what I want.

Then, the kitchen is upside down, and my brand new white dish towels are slowly drying with black tea stains, and I’m behind on my shopping, and there are piles of large adult children’s stuff tucked in around the edges of each room because that’s what college kids do with their stuff when home for break…

Bam! I get blind-sided by my own frustration and let it out! It’s not so much that I yell. Not my usual style. Rather, I bound into the room already on edge from shopping among thousands of other stressed last minute shoppers, aware that I have work to do, un-mindful of my hunger pangs, and cold. I see the evidence of a meal just made and the stained new tea towel—and react. I make declarative statements about who is responsible for “this mess” and blame randomly someone other than me for the tea towels and expect everyone to pop up and fix it.

I do, almost, cry. Over-reaction! Yet perhaps it is not at all an over-reaction. Perhaps that is the reaction that needed to happen hours before when I felt past my limit and worried about how I’d get it all done, before I entered the house and found someone to blame for my pent up anxiety.

The big kids snapped to, including my son’s girlfriend who also witnessed my meltdown. That’s when the guilt hit. I knew I’d been unnecessarily exasperated.

Fortunately for me, one of the kids called me on it. He stated calmly and honestly (but with hurt in his voice) that I had crossed a line—had crashed the peaceful atmosphere of the home with my anxiety and had misplaced my accusations. I hate that. I hate doing that. I hate being in the wrong. I hate that I had to apologize to my kids for that behavior and I even didn’t want to!

But I know it’s a gift—that if I can let go of my pride for a moment, I can stop the madness and start over with everyone. Which is what we did—I apologized, so did he, and we cleaned up the kitchen, and ate food, and turned up the thermostat, and watched TV by the fire.

Holidays are meant to be relaxed, homey opportunities for family togetherness. Weird how that vision can lead to the very things that undermine the goal: chaos, stress, expectation, and moodiness.

I rebooted last night. I’m glad my kids feel free to tell me when I’m out of line.

Posted in Julie's Life, Parenting | 2 Comments »

Give Your Children the Gift of Presence

The Gift of Presence

In the season of gift-buying and gift-giving and gift-thanking, it’s easy to forget to be “present” with and to your children. It is nearly impossible to remember most presents people buy for you. You might remember the Singer sewing machine for kids that your mom bought you at age 9, or the new bicycle, or the pocket knife you longed for. But the vast majority of trendy dolls and toys and sweater vests and art kits and Nerf guns and Lego sets—these are happily enjoyed until they wind up lost in the basement.

What is remembered with the gauzy haze of happy are the shared traditions—where kids got to do what adults do, and were enjoyed in the process.

  • Mashing the potatoes
  • Rolling out pie crust
  • Creating a center piece
  • Singing holiday songs while cleaning the kitchen
  • Hand-drawing place cards with gold ink pens
  • Hanging lights
  • Lighting the fire in the fire place
  • Touch football after turkey in the backyard
  • Lounging with family in front of the TV
  • Taking walks in the neighborhood bundled in scarves and hats
  • Eating as many turkey sandwiches as a person wants without asking permission
  • Staying up late
  • Sleeping in
  • Sparkling cider toasts to the out of town relatives in for the weekend
  • Taking turns bouncing the baby…

Ask your children what traditions they love. You will be surprised that some of the things you’ve done once (!) are on that list and now you know you’d better put them on the list for this year too!

One of our holiday traditions is to make an apple pie with a top crust made from maple leaf cut outs. I did it once—it became firmly cemented in all future Thanksgivings forever and ever, amen. Everyone wants a turn cutting the leaf shapes. My kids are adults. See what I mean?

Be present. Pause occasionally and appreciate the splendor of family that lives under one roof without the need to fly them in from anywhere. Look at the way the children light up thinking about their favorite foods when your energy flags. Ask for hugs and someone to tell you jokes while you cook to keep your own energy high!

Give to get to give to get to give to get… This is how the exchange works.

Be present to yourself, to your family, to your joy this holiday season.

A Gracious Space series

Posted in Parenting | 2 Comments »

It All Counts

It All Counts

Today’s thought: It all counts

  • The dish washing,
  • the foot rubbing,
  • the tub bathing,
  • the skip counting in the car,
  • the singing at the tops of your lungs together off key,
  • the carefully copied passage,
  • the shopping for groceries,
  • the spontaneous walk in the neighborhood,
  • the sorting the laundry into the right colored piles,
  • the charging of the dead phone,
  • the pause to text your sick mother-in-law,
  • the five minutes you take to regroup,
  • the gentle way you overlooked your child’s Big Mess,
  • the fifth book read after lunch when you usually only read three,
  • the naps (oh yes, the naps count!),
  • the petting of the dog,
  • the recitation of a few historical facts,
  • the listening carefully when your child explains how to beat level five,
  • the cuddles,
  • the enthusiastic cheer for small successes and big ones,
  • the science experiment you finally got through with all the right ingredients,
  • the trampoline jumping,
  • the needed and taken break…

This stuff also counts:

  • The short word,
  • the worry,
  • the rushing,
  • the aimlessness that takes over when exhausted,
  • the bickering,
  • the harsh tone when a child is simply being a child,
  • the endless pages of material a child already knows,
  • the push, push, push to work harder on what a child isn’t ready for,
  • the conversations with a spouse overheard by the child,
  • the missed opportunities to play,
  • the loss of contact with a teen,
  • the blankness that sets in when sick of homeschooling,
  • the lost moment when a child was excited but you were distracted,
  • the anxiety that something’s wrong,
  • the blues,
  • the bad math book that you spent too much on,
  • the co-op where a bully mistreats your one child,
  • the much-needed, not-taken break…

You get to choose what will count in your homeschool.

Brave Writer Lifestyle

Posted in Homeschool Advice, Parenting | 1 Comment »

Be More Interested in Thinking than Thoughts

Value Thinking more than Thoughts

When someone shares a strong opinion—even when unsubstantiated by facts and data—it’s easy to feel that it is your obligation to enlighten said person with the “truth” —the truth that has eluded them until they happened upon your smarter, more capable mind.

A child is necessarily younger and less experienced with the world than you are, so their opinions will come from a different (more limited) space. But those conclusions and thoughts are no less logical to the child, no less important, no less “true” in his or her own mind’s eye.

I don’t know anyone who has kept every opinion formed at age ten throughout the rest of life. Kids, teens, young adults, heck OLD adults, routinely revise their notions of what is true, right, and good all the time, as they add experiences, information, and relationships to their lives. Our job as parents isn’t to “safeguard” a particular set of ideas or beliefs (no matter how much we may hope that our kids will adopt a particular set).

Our job is to value cognitive processes that show our kids are learning to reflect on their thinking. We don’t do this to manipulate our kids to adopt our way of thinking. We do it to enhance the powers of thought that our kids are exhibiting.

Example.

When Johannah first became interested in animal rights, she wanted to find a way to make a difference. For her, that meant adopting veganism as her lifestyle. It would have been easy to forbid it (since I had to cook for six other meat-lovers in the family and her choice would be inconvenient) or to combat it with my experiences (I grew up vegetarian and I “knew” that she wouldn’t want to be one forever) or to rebut it with my own set of facts about health.

But what I could see in her commitment wasn’t an opinion about animal rights nearly as much as it was an expression of how she “took in” impacting information and then applied it to her life. She was showing me that when she took something seriously, she would make a corresponding choice to back it with her actions! What an amazing development in a young person—to not just rant about ideas, but to put into practice a highly inconvenient lifestyle choice to back up her convictions!

As a result, our family accommodated this choice. In fact, two more kids chose to become vegans as a result of watching this commitment lived out. We had lots of discussions about how we make commitments and to what causes. It was not easy for my three vegans to understand my choice to not be vegan, for instance. Just my own lifestyle provided them with a chance to learn how to peacefully co-exist with difference—different:

  • experiences,
  • thoughts,
  • choices,
  • facts.

Today, only one of the three is still vegan. They have their new reasons for why they live differently now. These new choices show growth in how they nuance commitments and what they believe. As I suspected, their ideas morphed and grew just like mine have over a lifetime.

When our kids become passionate about a belief, or when they are exploring ideas that may even seem uncomfortable to us, this is a chance to be supportive of the cognitive development happening right before our eyes!

It’s a wonderful thing to see a mind choose to think independently of the family culture—to branch out to find information, ideas, and commitments all their own. It doesn’t mean our kids will even land or stay with these ideas for good. Most of us shift identities and beliefs again and again throughout our lives.

Rather, our children, teens, young adults are doing the hard work of becoming—becoming people who know how to think for themselves, using the resources, experiences, and reasoning skills available at that stage in the journey.

All we have to do is buy soy milk, hummus, and Earth Balance margarine, while listening intently to the passionate plea to end violence against animals.

Raising Critical Thinkers

Brave Learner Home

Posted in Parenting, Raising Critical Thinkers | 2 Comments »

Be kind, be gentle

Opportunity for a kindness

I spent too much time today reading accounts of child abuse in homeschooling families. I couldn’t stop. It was like watching train wreck after train wreck in slow, horrible, inevitable motion. I didn’t want to keep reading; I couldn’t stop reading.

The dirty little secret in home education is how much control and anger get directed at our sweet young kids (and awkward fledgling teens) in the name of “helping” them to become self-disciplined models of character and academic achievement.

Be warned: A habit of hardness leaves lasting scars.

Certainly plenty of parents are the garden variety that offer big love and abundant support mixed with the occasional exasperated outburst and the daily hand-wringing (sometimes turned lecture) about how to ensure a successful education and smooth transition to adulthood—family jostling and bumping into each other as they make their way through the “we all live together” years.

But some of us bring that little bit extra—that zing, that pop, that over-zealous, over-functioning rigidity to our homeschools. We scream, we shame, we blame, we demean, we punish, we prophesy doom, we herald the end of the world… and sometimes, we even succumb to abuse—physical and verbal—in the name of love, in the name of homeschool, in the name of our ideology.

Tonight, I want to say: Shhhhhhhh.

Let it go.

Let your children be children. Let your teens struggle to emerge. Let yourself off the hook.

You don’t owe the world a model family. You don’t have to get it right. Neither do your kids.

Everyone gets better at growing up over time—including you, the parent.

Be the one who stands for kindness in your family. Be remembered for your gentleness. Wait an extra hour before acting and reacting.

Remember the kindness of your parents or significant adult caregiver—the stand-out memories that helped you through childhood. Be that person for your children.

And if you need it: get help. Today’s a great day to heal, to start over.

Your kids deserve peace, and so do you.

Cross-posted on facebook. Image by Celestine Chua (cc)

Posted in Parenting | 2 Comments »