Seriously…as a parent I feel like I’m constantly stressed out on finding the right words and approaches to reinforce the right things but sometimes articles from “the experts”:
Just make me seethe with contempt for how out of touch and frankly awful some parenting gurus are.
Its not all bad to be fair. I agree with number 2 and teaching kids how to recognize their own emotions and think empathetically but then there’s shit like number 3:
Furthermore, complaining about your job around your kids teaches them that work isn’t fun. As a result, they may grow up believing that adulthood is about spending half of your waking hours in complete misery.
Oh, well we can’t have that can we? Oh no junior, I swear daddy definitely loves clocking in at 6am and answering emails and crunching numbers rather then going outside to play basketball with you or build that new lego set. What, you’re grown up now and you hate your job and the way it makes you feel incredibly alienated in a way you never could have imagined? You just need to work on your attitude! Fuck that noise!
Even number 4, which I agree is good in practice, is arrived at for the wrong reasons. Its not about teaching kids some nonsense about being the sole arbiter and decision maker in charge of your life. Its about reinforcing the responsibilities and obligations you have to one another, whether that’s doing work or going to help grandma get some things down from the attic, or getting groceries for the week at the store.
In a few years I genuinely hope we evolve to the point of realizing that teaching our children neoliberal mindset is its own form of abuse.
You have to thread the needle though. I tried treating my kids like I would treat anyone else (obviously, anyone that I liked and with age appropriate language like you said). It wasn’t until I went to counseling that I realized that a lot of the shit that I thought was condescending to do to children, they actually really got a lot out of. My issue was that my parents we’re terrified of me growing up so they treated me like a little kid for way too long, but despite that they were really stingy on praise because they were just super busy and by the time they got home they were exhausted and wanted to veg out in front of the tv for a while.
So I was repeating that with my kids and now I have to manually relearn basic skills for making my kid feel like they’re getting enough attention and that the good things they do are actually good. I was explaining when they were bad because that’s what you do with an adult who fucked up. But kids thrive on attention and will start to play dumb and act out more to get you to waste more time explaining so that you forget about following through on consequences. The ADHD brain is real.
Also, I initially was very candid with my kid about problems in my life. And eventually I ran into them being constantly stressed out to the point of not being able to function. Kids just can’t handle the amount of stress hat we do.
To an extent, it is indeed the job of parents to shield their kids from their own trauma and to let them get used to the world in small steps. And it’s also part of that job to cater to them (what I would have called manipulation before this). I understand a lot of people here have struggled with narcissistic parents and have put a lot of effort into not replicating those behaviors, so I wanna say I’m not encouraging abuse. Just doing my best to point out that it’s possible for the pendulum to swing in the other direction and for it to become neglect
But kids thrive on attention and will start to play dumb and act out more to get you to waste more time explaining so that you forget about following through on consequences.
This is incredibly true. To highlight: my son played dumb in kindergarten for the longest time and the teacher was getting a bit concerned at his reading progress. I thought we were doing fine but he did one 1 on 1 session and the teacher called me to tell that he actually needed to get moved to the advanced reading group and, she suspected, was playing dumb to get more attention from her. I noticed the same thing where he will often ‘forget’ words/letters during bed time reading because he wants me to read in the voices. Eventually I started just reading the stories to him at bed time again and having him practice reading in other times.
This is the constant issue and stressor with parenting though. Its not only ok indulge and cater/shelter to your children…its necessary
