Slow Down And Breathe

Parents offering advice to other parents can be tedious and even awful. I'm going to do it anyway.

My perspective on parenting is informed by the advantages of my spot in life's travels. I'm retired after a long teaching career. My older children are in their thirties, which means I've had plenty of time to reflect on how well I did (or didn't) do as a parent. And because I'm now parenting another pair of very young humans, I can be both the old fart sharing parenting advice and the parent of littles getting it.

Childhood whips by both faster and slower than it seems to at the time. Every day brings a new Last Time (except that, of course, you don't know it was the Last Time until later), and yet the milestones ahead can seem like Sir Lancelot's attack on the Swamp Castle--always racing toward you, yet seeming to never arrive. 

It's a too-natural response to try to race forward to meet the future, to try to grab what's coming quickly in fear that you might somehow miss it entirely. 

It's the impulse that leads to all those parental worries that "My child hasn't done [insert feared accomplishment here] yet." Shouldn't my child be speaking in complete sentences by now? Shouldn't she be reading complete Shakespeare plays by now? Shouldn't he be able to run a five-minute mile by now? Shouldn't my child be able to write a complete novel by now? 

Schools feel and feed this push. Common Core in particularly pushed learning goals into lower grades. The very structure of "grade levels" as essentially median achievement levels for grades insures that a huge number of parents will be led to believe that their child is "behind." 

This race to the finish shows up in other ways, like serious sports leagues for five year olds and sixth grade proms and third graders with boyfriends and girlfriends and a hundred extracurricular activities because you want to be sure your child doesn't miss out on something. Sign Pat up for t-ball and have a coaching session at home every day, because how else can we be sure that Pat will get into Harvard?

I'm not arguing that we should ignore what lies ahead and indulge in a sole focus on the present. If you have no goals or directions, you end up wandering in a lazy aimless circle, spinning halfhearted cookies in the parking lot of life.

But pushing ahead in a race to meet the future before it gets here too often means that you miss what is happening right now. Not only that, but by pushing things before their time, your child ends up jaded or uninterested in what might have turned out to be a great part of their life.

I suspect that many parents are extra anxious, that a pervasive fear (which I noticed years and years ago trickling down to students) seeps into so much, a fear that we live in a world of scarcity and that the gulf between haves and have-nots is so wide and impossible to cross that we bring great urgency to our hope that our children grow up to be haves. I'm just not convinced that forcing them to race ahead is particularly helpful. 

I believe that mostly people get to their place in the world in their own way and in their own time. As teachers and parents, we can support and aid that journey, and we can also impede, disrupt and exacerbate the difficulties that naturally occur in that journey. 

So my self-administered parenting advice is to slow down and breathe. I fretted terribly about my two older children, feared that my mistakes had created real problems for them, worried that they would pay a price for my bad choices, and now my least favorite memories of their lives so far are the times I fretted, feared and worried my way into another sub-optimal parenting moment. My best memories are when I slowed down and just enjoyed who they were. And now, lo and behold, they found places in the world and become really excellent versions of themselves in their own way and they own time. Which I should have expected, because I've seen versions of that same story--finding your own way to your own place--play out a zillion times in students.

Slow down and breathe. Tomorrow will get here when it gets here and you can't force it to come sooner, and in the meantime you can enjoy and support the child who is right here in front of you today. Doesn't mean you aren't working steadily and earnestly to grow and build and move with purpose into the future. But what is here now is also precious, and like the future, entirely temporary. 

Slow down. Breathe. They will get there in their own way and their own time, and you can't force it, but you can appreciate it, assist it, and enjoy it.