NewsLetter #5 June 10, 2024
Your Thoughts Matter
You may have thought about being a parent, but you may not have thought about your concept of being a parent. What you do as a parent matters, but what you think about parenting is as important. Your thoughts about parenting will be the conceptual lens through which you will view your relationship with your child.
Your Conceptual Lens
First, this conceptual lens will determine how you approach the problems of parenting. Concepts of parenting are often described as parenting styles. The idea of a style would not be a bad way to describe parenting if these ideas did not overlap, but they do. In my opinion, the task of parenting is too complex to fit into a few categories. For example, there are authoritarian and permissive styles, yet there are situations in parenting that call for each of these styles. What exactly a parent should do depends on each situation. What matters most is what a parent does in each situation rather than her style.
I believe that what you think about your role as a parent is more influential to the way you raise your child than your style of parenting. For example, do you think your main role as a parent is to guide your child’s learning or to maintain rules. Which of these roles comprises the majority of your interactions with your child?
A Complex Skill Set
Your concept of parenting affects how you interact with your child. But it also puts a ceiling on your growth as a parent. In my opinion, parenting is more than just a skill set. It’s an emotional, conceptual, and spiritual journey. In a journey, you don’t stay in one place. Nor do you travel to nearby places. The journey of parenting will likely change you more than any other experience in your life. It will also challenge you more and require more from you. This is true regardless of your parenting style. Whatever you bring to parenting, I recommend you bring the flexibility to grow as a person and as a parent.
Dynamic Concept of Parenting
The necessity to grow personally doesn’t augur well for a static concept of parenting. Recommendations for actions in specific situations of parenting are helpful and do exits. But the dark secret behind these recommended procedures is that you have to implement them. How you implement them matters. But how you implement procedures is strongly influenced by your experiences as a child and as a parent.
As a child, you had the experience of being raised, of being on the receiving end of parenting. Now, as a parent, you are on the giving end of the relationship. The two sets of experiences will interact and overlap. If your parents are still alive, you are still experiencing the parent-child relationship in the role of child. Simultaneously, you are discovering the role of parent. The two relationships will influence one another. For example, if you had strong feelings as a child about the way your parents disciplined you, you may tend to discipline your child in a different way as a parent. But will this different way always be the best for your child in every situation? Probably, not. Children are more complex than that.
Thus, in your growth as a parent, you must get insights into your experiences as a child being raised and apply them to your experiences as a parent raising a child. There are few things you will do in your life that will challenge you as much as raising a child. You will need to continuously transform your concepts of parenting and continuously apply those transformations.