Having the Foresight to Parent with Hindsight

In terms of parenting I take a laissez-faire approach; with exactly one child, my four-year-old daughter Hadley is very accustomed to entering her world of play, for the most part, alone. When she plays with other children, I rarely see the need to structure their play or to get involved in their minor spats; this has allowed Hadley the foresight to be flexible with difficult children-a skill we all need to hone for the betterment of the world.

However, like many parents, I have also been known to become annoyed at the continuous firing of questions in the car on long rides home and asking her to hush so I can hear the news. I have friends who are remind me that there will come a day when I won't be able to get my child to utter one complete sentence to me, and that is when I'll get a chance to listen to the news. We all develop our patterns out of our individual childhood experiences, our personalities, and our own needs.

As a public school teacher, I am fortunate to spend summers home with my daughter. I love it, but also come to long for the routine and satisfaction that being in the classroom provides for me. It was this past summer that I noticed my next-door-neighbor, who happens to be a grandmother with the tough job of raising her grandchildren as her own, taking a different approach: the grass-can-grow-long-while-I-take-the-time-to-push-these-babies-on-the-swing-while-I-have-the chance-to approach. Morning after morning while I sipped my coffee, peering out the kitchen window, I'd see her at the backyard swing set pushing away with a bright, promising smile to welcome the start of another day. And while I trekked out to the edge of my yard to hang the laundry out, she'd be there in the afternoon, assisting them in the kiddy pool or sprinkler. As I paced the yard with the push-mower, she'd be in hers helping the kids catch toads. And more often than not, it was my kid joining hers in all the fun next door.

Once, while coming to collect my daughter I noticed the living room was decorated in streamers and balloons and a cake, placed on the coffee table.

"Whose birthday is it?" I asked surprised. Surely if a birthday party was on its way I'd have heard of this from the birthday-party-obsessed Hadley.

"Nobody's," my neighbor replied. "We just thought it'd be fun to have a birthday party."

I don't know what it takes to have this sort of energy and innovation as a mother-or just as a human being. But she certainly has something as a parent that I don't have, and something I haven't seen in parents of my age: a different perspective.

So while it's true that you only get one shot at raising a child, that doesn't mean you only get one shot at parenting. A 2006 American Community Survey suggests that nearly 6.1 million grandparents have grandchildren younger than 18 living with them. What that says about society, I'm not here to say. But I do know that it's got to be a different experience the second time around. As a parent, I'm only filled with the wisdom a 29 year-old woman is able to acquire, to the detriment of my child and all of society! But this is the way it's been done for all of time. The best one can do is consider the words of others. So I asked others, other moms who are now grandmothers or near grandmothers, and there were similarities in their answers, though nothing new under the sun.

Patience

As parents we work jobs to earn money, transport the family to and fro, do the housework, the paperwork, and on and on. Society is certainly different from the one in which we were raised, and the one in which our parents were raised, but the short run on patience ("I did a lot of hollering when I was a young mother," as one put it so frankly) seems to be a common denominator for many of us when it all gets worn down, and yet the necessity for it doesn't change when it comes to young children who have all of those questions to fire off on that long ride home at the end of the day. Perhaps this is the most obvious, most in-demand virtues for all of humanity.

Tradition

Tradition can be the icing on the cake when it comes to a generational point of view. I love to dig out the somewhat tacky, shoddy manger scene that my mother set out every Christmas. I remember spending a lot of time studying Mary and wondering exactly what she was thinking in her blue gown, gazing down at her (strangely) blonde-haired baby Jesus. When I inherited that same nativity I proudly placed it before my own little girl, and love to watch her set up her Pet Shops and Ponies alongside the shepherds. But the teaching of tradition is also the inclusion of new traditions, or another attempt at the ones that our parents weren't able to make last. For example, the family meals at the table, which seem to show up in sociological studies and has become a trend promoted in parenting magazines, but also serves the parents, who long for that family time that they either missed, or never had.

What We Teach (Inadvertently) as Being Important

Oops! I didn't mean to speak with my actions that making money was the only thing mattered! Too late now. I didn't mean, by never attending church that church wasn't important. Too late now.

Teaching Children to Be Satisfied

Yes, yes, the ever-indulging generation of parents who give their children everything they had as kids, and everything they didn't have as kids. But the satisfaction the parents get from watching that momentary expression on the faces of their does little to create authentic satisfaction or gratefulness in the souls of the impressionable.

Mistakes are inevitable and hindsight is 20/20. Perhaps the best advice for the inexperienced parent is to envision it as a journey as well as a destination, with time invested in the short-term, the long-term, and the eternal.

Sources:http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/012095.html