Go with the flow…

Something I (Kris) have noticed over my life is that most parents seem to think that there is a formula they have to follow.  If they deviate, the world may in fact end…or at least their child will grow up to be a hooligan drug dealing prostitute and/or murderer.  When the baby is young, that makes sense, especially for new parents.  You don’t know what you’re doing, so you either fall back on what your parents did, choose a parenting style from books, or take advice from someone else.  If anything, at least it lets you do less thinking in that stage where thinking coherant thoughts is often a miracle.

My problem with this is when that formula based parenting is carried on indefinitly.  Its pretty common to find parents who do things a specific way because thats what they read or how they were parented.  They often think that thats just how you parent.  A perfect example is the “crying it out method”.  Why do parents choose to do this?  Is it because they feel good hearing their little babies screaming for hours on end?  While I’m sure there are some heartless people somewhere, most of us feel our babies crying in our bones and it isn’t fun.  These people follow this “method”, and I use that term very very very loosely, because thats what they were told you were supposed to do.  They either read it in a book, heard it from a relative, from a parenting class or whatever and not knowing better believe thats how it is.

First of all, there is no right way of doing everything.  Even in science, 9 times out of 10 you talk about theories, not facts.  Why?  Because there’s always the chance you’ll eventually be proved wrong.  Einsteins THEORY of relativity.  Newton’s THEORY of gravity.  The THEORY of global warming (a personal pet peeve but I might go into that some day when something really pisses me off).  There are very few hard facts in life.  Even something as simple as 1 + 1 = 2 is only true most of the time, not all of the time.  So why do parents think there is a single right way of parenting?  Far as I can tell, kids aren’t like computers.  Giving them the same input won’t equal the same output.

Second problem, parents aren’t trying to figure out what is right themselves, instead they want someone (or something) to tell them what to do.  Parenting books, while a good resource, aren’t the be all and end all of parenting.  Like anything else, a book is the opinion of the author, and only as good as that authors experiences and research.  They are also a business which is why you find all sorts of “methods” in parenting.  Anything that might make some money has probably been written about, both good and amazingly bad.

As the title of this post indicates, parenting requires you to go with the flow.  You can’t decide before hand how to handle situations.  You can talk about it and try and plan things out a little in advance, but life has a way of screwing up your plans (be they travel plans or parenting plans).  Each situation that comes up needs to be handled independantly from the rest.  This is where I probably differ from most parenting styles or guides.  Consistency is trumpeted as THE MOST important thing you can do.  Some examples:

• If you say no, follow through NO MATTER WHAT! (Funny how this rarely is expressed as if you say yes, follow through no matter what).
• If you don’t want them to have sugar, never let them have sugar
• If bedtime is 7pm, bedtime is always 7pm.

The list could go on forever.  But what parents don’t generally ask themselves is why.  They also never put themselves in the kids shoes.  Do you never change your mind about your own decisions?  do you never eat something that isn’t healthy?  Do you always go to bed exactly at the same time?  Of course not, so why do kids have to?

If you take each situation as an individual event, you can remain consistent overall while still allowing you to change your mind between events.  Maybe they give you a good reason why saying no doesn’t make sense.  Most parents will say “Too bad, I already said no” no matter what the kid has to say.  Maybe they had a nap and aren’t tired at bedtime.  What harm could it possibly do to let them stay up later?  I’m pretty sure most kids have enough sense to go to sleep when they’re tired, unlike a lot of adults I could name.

Not only does this sound more like how we treat ourselves and other adults, it’s also much easier to remain consistent.  If the kid knows that you’ll give them the answer you think best each time, then they’ll more likely accept it if you give them different answers each time.  They might question it (heaven forbid) but assuming you have a good reason for your answer that shouldn’t be a problem.  On top of that, you won’t have to worry about them pulling the “Mom said it was ok/Dad said it was ok” trick, or just choosing the parent most likely to give the best answer.  You also don’t need to try and remember what you said last time, because it doesn’t matter anymore.

The only thing that matters is the here and now, which is how it should be.

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