Parenting child for a Better Future.
Parenting in Three Stages
Stage One: The Child Is Born
Here’s what a parent
is: A parent is a person who has children. Here’s what’s involved in being a
parent: you love your children, you hang out with them from utensil is the
salad fork, you teach them to say please and thank you, you see that they have
an occasional haircut, and you ask if they did their homework.
You understood that
your child had a personality. His very own personality. He was born with it.
For a certain period, this child would live with you and your personality, and
you would do your best to survive each other.
This was a somewhat
mystifying concept when you first had a baby. Exactly what was it about the
baby that would never change? After all, it’s incredibly difficult to tell what
a baby’s exact personality is when it’s merely a baby. But eventually, the baby
in question began to manifest its personality, and sure enough, remarkably
enough, that personality never changed.
All sorts of additional
personnel were required to achieve the transformational effect that was the goal of parenting—baby whisperers, sleep counsellors, shrinks, learning
therapists, family therapists, speech therapists, tutors—and, if necessary,
behaviour-altering medication, which, coincidentally or uncoincidentally, was
invented at almost the exact moment that parenting came into being.
(The willingness on the
part of both parents to be present at any place at any time had the interesting a side effect of causing schools to rely on parents to oversee all sorts of
, events that used to be supervised by trained professionals.)
Parenting meant that
whether or not your children understood you, your obligation was to understand
them; understanding was the key to everything. If your children believed you
understood them, or a least tried to understand them, they wouldn’t hate you
when they become adolescents; what’s more, they would grow up to be happy,
well-adjected adults who would never have to squander their money (or, far more
likely, yours) on psychoanalysis or whatever, fashion in self-improvement had
come along to take its place.
Parenting used entirely
different language from just plain parenthood, language you would never write
in big capital letters in order to make clear that it had been uttered
impulsively or in anger.
Stage Two: The Child Is an
Adolescent
Adolescence comes as a
gigantic shock to the modern parent, in large part because it seems so much
like the adolescence you yourself went through. Your adolescent is sullen. Your
adolescent is angry. Your adolescent is mean. In fact, your adolescent is mean
to you.
Your adolescent has changed, but not in any of the ways
you’d hoped for when you set about to mould your child. Any you have changed
too. You have changed from a moderately neurotic, fairly cheerful human being
to an irritable, crabby, abused wreck.
But not to worry.
There’s somewhere you can go for help. You can go to all the therapists and
counsellors you consulted in the years before your children became adolescents,
the therapists and counsellors in the years before your children became
adolescents, the therapists and counsellors who’ve put their own children
through college and probably law school thanks to your ongoing reliance on them.
Here’s what
they will say:
· Adolescence is for adolescents, not for
parents.
· It was invented to help attached—or
over-attached—children to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment
when they leave the nest.
· There are things you can do to make
life easier for yourself.
This advice will cost you hundreds—or thousands—of dollars,
depending on whether you live in a major metropolitan area or a minor one. And it’s completely untrue:
· Adolescence is for parents, not
adolescents.
· It was invented to help attached—or
over-attached—parents to separate, in preparation for the inevitable moment when
their children leaven the nest.
· There is almost nothing you can do to
make life easier for yourself except wait until it’s over.
Stage Three: The Child Is Gone
The anxiety. The
apprehension. What will life be like? Will the two of you have anything to talk
about once your children are gone? Will you have sex now that the presence of
your children is no longer an excuse for not having sex?
The day finally comes.
You child goes off to college. You wait for the melancholy. But before it strikes—before
it even has time to strike—a shocking thing happens: your child comes right
back. These vacations aren’t called “vacations,” they’re called “breaks” and “reading
periods.”
If you find yourself
nostalgic for the ongoing, day-to-day activities required of the modern parent,
there’s a solution: Get a dog. I don’t recommend it, because dogs require
tremendous commitment, but they definitely give you something to do. Plus they’re
very loveable and, more important, uncritical. And they can be trained.
They survived you. You survived
them. It crosses your mind that on some level, you spent hours and days and
months and years without laying a glove on them, but don’t dwell. There’s no
point. It’s over.
Except for
the worrying.
The worrying
is forever.
This Article is Taken From
I Feel Bad About My Neck
Business-related post’s: How to Reward Yourself
Written By Arshad. A