Simplicity Parenting (36 page)

Some couples strive for a fifty/fifty split; for most the percentages change according to a number of factors. What has struck me over time, however, is the importance, for couples and children, of each parent taking fairly exclusive responsibility for several aspects of daily life. That doesn’t mean that parents shouldn’t have some areas of shared responsibility, and spend time together with daily life tasks. But the work of child care can expand to fill most every crevice. And for one person to really get a break, to really let go of a task mentally and physically, the other must do it consistently, with no need for requests or reminders.

When a partner takes a role in various aspects of a child’s life, their understanding of the child broadens and deepens. With consistency
and exclusivity from each, there is much greater rhythm in the household. There are anchors established, guaranteed opportunities for connection.

Men often feel that when they take over a responsibility previously held by their wives, their efforts are doomed to inadequacy. They feel as though they are speaking a common language—whether the dialect of baths, bedtime, dressing or school meetings, car pool or breakfasts—but with a foreign accent. Their versions of the task are perceived as “less than” in addition to being “different.” Success involves effort and some level of short-term discomfort from both partners. Until the change feels natural, accommodations have to be made, methods changed, and standards realigned. For most women, as an alternative to doing
everything
, doing things
differently
becomes a welcome transformation. As with partner dancing, a person can’t step forward unless his partner steps back. I’ve found that exclusive domains help both partners move away from the extremes of over-or underinvolvement, and toward each other.

Backing Off—Less Emotional Monitoring

It’s not often that you ponder the merits of your driveway, but you do once your child learns how to ride a two-wheeler. Back and forth, back and forth my daughter rode, the summer she was seven. Fairly long and fairly straight, our driveway is safe, but not long enough. Walking down to get the mail, I could see that just as she worked up some speed it was time to turn around. One hot day that summer, she was singing a song as she rode, back and forth, back and forth, her brow furrowed. The song went something like this: “I’m as afraid as a ’fraidy cat.”

Coming in for a snack, she announced that she was going on an adventure. Grabbing a backpack, she stuffed in a hat, a book, and a bottle of water. The screen door slammed, resolutely, on her way out. And yet, twenty-five minutes later, she was still riding up and down the driveway, singing “I’m as brave as a great big lion” as she rode away from the house, and “I’m as afraid as a ’fraidy cat” on her way back.

The issue clearly wasn’t just the length of the driveway. She wanted, and didn’t want, and really wanted to move beyond the circle of home. Her backpack ready, her sights on the country road outside our fence, she longed to go. When she wasn’t also longing to stay. We heard the bike fall onto the ground and in she came, this time in tears. Her
mother leaned down and asked, “What do you need to do it?” Mid-blubber, our daughter looked up, surprised and hopeful, and said, “Do you think you could ride with me, just as far as the cow barn?”

So Katharine got on her bike and they rode down the road, cutting in on the dirt road next to the barn. When that doglegged back toward the stream, Katharine gave our daughter a kiss and turned toward home. I remember when she got back, Katharine and I shared a little laugh, relieved and pleased that our sweet child had been able to cross this stormy threshold, so clearly important to her. I should also note, though, that an hour and fifteen minutes later, when she still wasn’t back, her mom and I did share a few less cheerful, more nervous moments. We managed—I hope—an air of calm confidence when our daughter did walk through the door, a triumphant smile on her face. It turns out the threshold was a bit stormy for the couple of adult ’fraidy cats as well.

Remember what a relief it was when your toddler was first able to tell you where it hurt when they were ill? When they’re babies, we sometimes feel like cryptologists, looking for various clues—Do they have a fever? Are they pulling on their ears? Are they flushed?—to crack the code of how they’re feeling. Still, our instincts became well honed. We learned to recognize the signs: variations in how they looked, sounded, or behaved, to determine when something was up. Such instincts are important and can continue to serve us well throughout our children’s early years. In terms of your child’s emotional life, and their soul fevers, those parental instincts are more important than words.

Many of us parents take our children’s “emotional temperature” several times a day. We monitor their feelings, asking them to describe those feelings, to express them, to talk about them. We expect our children to have a complex awareness of their own emotions, with the insight and vocabulary to convey that awareness. While our intentions are well-meaning—“Honey, do you think your anger at your sister might also be a little jealousy? Can you tell her how you feel inside?”—this emotional monitoring has an unexpected effect. It rushes kids along, pushing them into a premature adolescence.

Children under nine certainly have feelings, but much of the time those feelings are unconscious, undifferentiated. In any kind of conflict or upset, if asked how they feel, most kids will say, very honestly, “Bad.” They feel bad. To dissect and parse that, to push and push, imagining that they are hiding a much more subtle and nuanced feeling or reply, is invasive. It is also usually unproductive, except perhaps in making a child nervous. While young children have feelings, they only slowly become aware of them. Until the age of ten or so, their emotional consciousness and vocabulary are too premature to stand up to what we ask of them in our emotional monitoring and hovering.

Thanks in part to the pioneering work of Howard Gardner, Daniel Goleman, and others, our view of what constitutes intelligence has expanded in the past few decades to include emotional intelligence. Clearly a person’s success and happiness in life depend on more than their penmanship, their mastery of foreign languages, or their ability to plot complex algorithms. What makes a huge difference in whether a person will achieve their goals and connect with others is a set of skills, insights, and abilities that Goleman termed “emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence includes a self-awareness that allows one to recognize and manage one’s moods, and to motivate oneself toward a goal. It involves feeling empathy toward others, being aware of their feelings, and being able to relate to others through interaction, conflict resolution, and negotiations.

As we mature, we certainly become more cognizant of how people with high emotional intelligence stand out—in business and personal relations, and even in mundane, everyday transactions. How delightful it is to meet someone who smiles at you, and offers their help with a genuine sense of caring. How frequently we realize that a conflict could have been avoided had we been more aware of another’s feelings, or more in control of our own.

In our hopes and our dreams for our children, emotional intelligence should probably elbow out that football scholarship, or the viola concert tour, even the stellar report card. Emotional intelligence would serve them every day, and in every social setting they encounter as an adult. A GPS system of the heart, emotional intelligence is what we strive for in our own lives, and what we want for our children.

Yet emotional intelligence can’t be bought or rushed. It develops with the slow emergence of identity, and the gradual accumulation of life experiences. When we push a young child toward an awareness they don’t yet have, we transpose our own emotions, and our own voice, on
theirs. We overwhelm them. For the first nine or ten years children learn mainly through imitation. Your emotions, and the way that you manage them, is the model they “imprint,” more than what you say or instruct about emotions.

One way to back off from parental overinvolvement is to allow a child more leeway and privacy with their own feelings. By imposing our emotions on them less, we allow our children to develop their own emotions, and their awareness of them. Rather than taking their emotional temperature frequently with probing questions, we can allow our instincts to guide us more when they are quite young. We can be available, and willing, to listen. Follow their lead as to what and how much they want to express. Trust that our instincts will tell us when there is much more involved emotionally than they are able or willing to say. Usually, your consistent willingness to listen is what they need. It offers both the help and the trust they need to
feel
their emotions, and to slowly become aware of them. To begin to recognize them. As a part of themselves. The selves they are slowly (with freedom and grace) becoming.

When your children are young, let the world of
doing
be their domain. There was no real help for Sophia’s dilemma except to let the lion leave the ’fraidy cat behind on the driveway. That bike had to be ridden; words would not have helped. Often when young kids feel emotional about something—when they’re angry or hurt or sad—they need to put it right by doing. They need to have a hug or give one, to dig a hole or find the dog, they need to draw a picture with a lot of green in it, or make something. They need to work it out by doing. If they need to talk, it helps to know you will listen. They might need to throw something (hopefully not at their sister), to throw it again and maybe again until they’ve made a game where one bounce is a win but two means you’ve fallen into molten lava. They need to engage in the world, to put the feeling to right in some physical way. And with that, sometimes, they may need a bit of help.

Backing Off—Into Sleep

Is there a standardized test for unexpected, remarkable moments? A ratio, a guideline of how many ordinary moments in a day should shimmer and stand apart? A number that we are allotted, depending on the age or the height or the birthday of each child? Look at your daughter’s eyes, astonished and joyful, as she sees the pale blue robin’s eggs in the
nest she’s found. Or your three-year-old son, as bright and bold as the summer sun, who seems determined to greet absolutely everyone he passes on a crowded beach. Thankfully, there is no way to quantify these moments, no graph to plot their frequency, quality, or duration. No way to compare or qualify them.

When Annmarie’s mother was raising children, “parenthood” was not yet a “science.” It had not yet been studied from every angle, every possible academic lens, nor was it the subject of countless books and theories. “Parenting” was not the most crowded shelf at the bookstore; before Benjamin Spock, there were no parenting gurus. Annmarie’s mother probably knew how Annmarie compared to her brother as a baby, but she wouldn’t have been able to say that at eighteen months Annmarie fell into the 90th percentile for height and the 95th percentile for weight compared with all babies her age.

For better or worse, ours is an era of conscious—some might say hyperconscious—parenting. Of course it is helpful to know when children should reach developmental milestones; guidelines are important in determining when a child might need help or intervention. But too often anxiety is the result of all of the graphing and comparing we do, the percentages, benchmarks, standards, and criteria that now influence our view of our children. As a parent, Annmarie may have more information than her mother did, but does she enjoy, or worry about, her children more as a result? For all of the measures we now have at our fingertips, by and large children defy them by being both more “normal” and more extraordinary than any scientific measure, or means of quantifying them.

If one image of overinvolvement is the helicopter or hovering parent, another image—one that occurs to me often—is that of a parent looking at their child through a magnifying glass. Armed with this study or that, this criterion for achievement or that measure of normalcy or “giftedness,” we monitor their behavior closely. But the magnifying lens is not helpful; its view is too close to be pretty, or even representative of the child.