Monday, November 22, 2010Radical Parenting #1Let's talk about parenting.I have some pretty radical ideas about parenting, although it hadn't been brought to my attention until recently. Much to my surprise, I'm really pushing some pretty major traditional parenting envelopes in my various philosophies about children. As I promised, however, I'm going to break out and actually put words to some of my more incendiary notions. So grab your Dr. Spock, put the toddler into a time out, and be prepared to hear the first of Kathy's whacked out assertions about these people we call our kids. Kathy's First Radical Belief about Children: Children are people. They actually are. They come out of the chute with their own brains. They have their own bodies. They have their own personalities. They like the things they like. And they dislike the things they dislike. The moment my second son was born I realized instinctively what scientists have been arguing about for ages. In the battle between nature and nurture, nature wins. My second son, at the ripe old age of zero, was simply, and obviously, and immediately, a very different entity than my first son. They are both their own people, and they started out with much of their personality already intact. They were knowable from day one. Which means to me that it is not entirely incumbent upon us parents to form these little blobs of clay into fully formed human beings. To that I say a big WHEW, and apologize to all the therapists out there who make their living blaming everything on the parents. Now, that's not to say that we, as parents, can't fuck our kids up. We certainly can. Kathy's theory of radical parenting includes an idea that, while most of our kids' personalities are almost entirely nature-created, how our kids interact with themselves and the outside world are very much informed by what we model to them as parents. Let me explore this a bit. From us our child learns how to feel about him or herself. From us our child learns how to be with other people. We model relationships for him, and we show him how much he is valued. From us, his parents and caregivers, he learns how much to trust his own instincts, how much to count on the reliability of his feelings. He learns whether he's worthy or not. And he learns how to conduct his social relationships. Our children, I believe, learn this by modeling, rather than by our talking at them. I think they watch us conduct our marriages, take care of ourselves, interact with others, and then they use that as a blueprint for how to interact in the same way. (Or not. Negative modeling is oftentimes far more of a powerful imprint than positive modeling.) All the other stuff in a child -- their tendency to eat things that start with the letter P, their aversion to clothing that contain any colorful pigment, their learning preferences -- all that, I believe, is mainly nature-based. Anything that has to do with how they literally perceive the world through their senses is nature. There are also peer influences, but I think you get my point. Children are people much like -- I know, this is where it gets a bit out there -- we are. Just as we are a combination of hard-wired preferences and tendencies, so are they. They come out like that, just like we did. You'd be surprised at how rarely this concept actually looks like it's being acted upon. Many parents, it seems to me, spend all their energy trying to mold these people into little dolls that behave and think like they think they should. They battle and fight and impose limits and force activities on them and fight with them and ridicule them and tsk tsk tsk that they are such a disappointment when they don't turn out exactly as the parents' current blueprint dictates. Here's Kathy's Radical New Idea: we can just respect and accept the fact that these children are people in their own right, and we can get to know them. We can enjoy the fact that we have been graced with these very amazing creatures in our lives and we can treat them like the people they are, rather than the clones we may want them to be. This gets into some other crazy ideas I have, so I'm going to stop here and let you think about this for awhile. Respect and accept. They are people too. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 9:00 AM  
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