Past and present parenting
I remember myself ten years ago, when Kiki was little. Parenting was still new to me then, but I had some very clear ideas about how it should happen. I look at myself now and I am doing some of the things that I believed I would never do.
I thought I would never push my kids into extra curricular activities. I currently have Link in gymnastics classes, not because it is something he loves, but as a form of physical therapy. I did not understand back then the things I know now about practice. I did not realize that preteens start needing something more than enjoyment, that they need purpose and a goal to strive for. Link finds energy and satisfaction from gymnastics even if a particular lesson is frustrating or embarrassing. Sometimes he’ll walk out of a lesson angry and frustrated, but what he says to me is not “I want to quit” but “I need to practice.” And so I scramble to help him practice so that the next week can go better.
I thought that kids should not be over scheduled. I still believe this, but my definitions have altered to include the fact that some kids need more structured activity than others. Gleek enjoys her free play time, but she also gets bored if there is too much of it. She needs things to do. If I don’t put her into activities, then the burden falls upon me to find constructive activities for her. So Gleek has both Gymnastics and Piano as well as a twice monthly church activity group. This leaves her plenty of play time, but gives her things to practice when she is bored. It is a good balance for now. But it will not surprise me if she needs even more schedule when she starts hitting the pre-teen years. On the other hand, Patch does well with long stretches of self-directed play. So does Kiki.
We were far less immersed in electronic entertainments when Kiki was little. In fact I had a ban on battery operated toys of any kind. Mostly I found that the batteries were simply there to provide additional noise or lights without significantly adding to the play value of the toy. I lifted the ban when I realized that I was making gift giving extremely difficult for my technology loving father. So now we run things on batteries and we play quite a lot of video games. I’m not always sure this particular shift is a good thing. We’d all benefit from playing outdoors more. At least we continue to not bring commercial laden television into the house. We still watch shows that we love, but it is all via DVD or online sources. This way we can pay for the content we love and avoid supporting idiotic commercials that we don’t.
I think the biggest shift is that when Kiki was little, I could not have pictured myself as a working mother. I was completely immersed in parenting and house maintenance. If you had asked me, I probably would have admitted that once the kids were all in school, I would pick up some sort of a job. I would not have been able to tell you what the job would be. I thought the switch over would be an event. Instead work slipped into existence piece by piece before I knew it was happening. What would my younger self think of my life now, I wonder. She would probably worry about the harried pace I keep. I know that I look back at her and wonder what she did with her time. But then I think and remember what it was like to have my days chopped into tiny slices by the needs of infants and toddlers. I remember what it was like to sleepwalk through the day because baby wouldn’t sleep. I remember the endless thing after thing. My days were full then too, they were just full in a different way.
So much of my life now is different than what I could have predicted. My choices have altered because of those differences. I wonder what thing I will find myself doing in the future that I would not consider now. It would be a scary thought, except that I am still guided by the same principles that drove my parenting in the past. The difference in choices is driven by differences in information, not fundamental changes in what I believe. So my future choices will be different, but they do not frighten me because I will still be me, just a more informed and experienced version of myself.