Over the last couple of years I have climbed down from my high horse on many an issue. Mostly to do with parenting. I have learnt a lot, realised that some of my idealistic views were actually very unrealistic and had plenty of my smugness knocked out of me 😉 Issues such as bedtimes, discipline, violence and remaining calm to deal with small people have all had my orginal viewpoint tweaked shall we say 😉
This has been helped by having two small people of my own who came with no instructions, minds of their own and like all offspring a tendancy to rebel against their parents! I have always prided myself on an ability to admit I am wrong, show tolerance and respect for others views even if I still retain the belief that I am right. Within the privacy of my own home – and head – and with friends I might well judge others but in the main I have developed far more of a live and let live and maybe even learn something by watching as you do it attitude. This has also been helped by mixing with a far wider variety of people through Home Educating that I had previously been ‘exposed’ to for the previous 29 years of my life.
HESFES brought up and challenged a few of my closely held parenting ideas. I have also been reading bits and pieces about non coercive parenting and TCS too and on a personal level would place myself in that odd position of growing into being a parent while still being aware of being a child to my own parents too. I still have enough of my own teen rebellion left in me to kick against what my own parents try and tell me to do, all the while conscious that in many small ways I am turning into them with all my own little quirks and ways to my own children. I ponder what it means to me to be a parent, what my responsibilities are – to my children and to society. I wonder what aspects of my parenting and my personality my kids will sit and moan about when they are grown, what they will take and do the same with their own children, what they will discard as totally rubbish and vow never to do themselves. I think I think too much about thinking! 🙂
So, at this moment in time what I *think* my ‘job’ is in terms of parenting is as follows:
*to provide unconditional love. To do that for as long as I live. To let them know that in myriad different ways and to give them that knowledge above all else to keep them sane, warm at night, help them to know that by being lovable they should love themselves and to know that no matter what they do, no matter how they stumble and fall I will always be there, somewhere, loving them inspite of and even because of it. To meet as many of their emotional needs as I can.
* to provide as best I can for all their material and physical needs.
* to enjoy them as people. To celebrate their individual personalities, characters and love them who for they are.
* to equip them with as many of the skills I can to survive in the world , to help them become responsible adults.
* to help them identify and realise their dreams.
etc 🙂
So how best to do that? At this young age I have no doubt in my current style of giving them boundaries, rules, lines which should not be crossed, routine and a clear understanding that I am the boss. But where does that end? Where do I begin to relinquish some of that grip? Where do I start to trust in what I am touting as the right path and allow them to use the skills I believe I am giving them to start making their own decisions? When do I let go?
I know from my own experience that the areas my parents were most liberal in with me were the ones in which I experimented up to my own comfort zone, knowing clearly that the responsibilty was mine and the decisions were mine to make, as were the consquences to deal with. They were also the areas in which I felt my parents had got it most right.
And deal with consequences I did. I won’t go into them here as some of them were fairly controversial and that is not what this is about. Suffice to say much as I would love to spare my children some of the most dramatic of those experiences I also hold them up as the ones which make me the person I am today and whilst they were not pleasant to go through at the time I do not actually regret any of them. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that. I know that you cannot learn from someone elses mistakes, only from your own. But how impossible is it going to prove watching my kids replicate my own behaviour at some point in the future knowing how damaging it could be?
Much as I have been curious, and still am, and that curiosity often propells me to do things just to see ‘what if?’ I also have an inherant (and not sure where it came from but I can’t shake it off) fear of being ‘in trouble’. I hate feeling I have done something wrong and that fear of the knock on the door coming to say you have been found out. For me, being arrested for something would be one of the worst things I could imagine happening to me. (there are early childhood reasons for this which again I won’t go into here). That fear has always kept most of my pursuits to the harmless, pretty much within the law side of things, but stuff I would shudder at my ‘babies’ getting up to just the same.
I think the best I can aim for is to provide them with open lines of communication in the hopes they felt they could talk to me if they needed to, providing as much information on all the various things which they may be faced with so they are at least informed and educated and know what their choices are, giving them the confidence to decide if they want to do something and to know that if they are it is because they genuinely want to do it rather than feel obliged, pressured or ‘everyone else is doing it’!
My worry, and my issue with the whole attitude of some of the HESchat folk is that they feel that 12 or 13 is a perfectly acceptable age to allow children (and to my mind that age is still a child) to start making such decisions for themselves. Making decisions means taking responsibility for the consequences of those decisions too. I am totally horrified that a child who was not even yet 13 replied to my post about teens and drugs to say she saw my point but still thought that HESFES was a nice safe environment for kids to experiment. WTF!!! I am 31 and still struggling with taking responsibility!
My hypocrisy of the title is in regard to the fact that many of the decisions I already make wrt the kids are open to question. I don’t feed them nutritious balanced meals at all times, I drink (my drug of choice) and allow them to try it (which I can’t really argue is better than the pot smokers letting their kids do it can I? Or only on the basis that my drug of choice is legal and theirs isn’t) in small doses – I’m working on the basis that by removing the mystique they are maybe less likely to want to ‘experiment’ but I’m probably wrong
I don’t have any big opinion on the teens at HESFES, to me they were behaving like any other teens (myself included at that age) and just being, well, teens. I was oblivious, possibly through being off site or possibly through being fairly uninterested, of any big drugs and sex fest going on. But it has become apparant from the lists I read after the event that it was going on and much as I don’t want to judge it or the people doing it I still don’t think it should go on. I still don’t think young teens should be doing illegal things in a field in Dorset with the full consent of their parents. I don’t want my young teens when they are young teens to be thrust into that environment in such a manner, I don’t want to be putting them somewhere where they are forced into making decisions one way or another at such a young age.
That’s all.
‘I don’t want my young teens when they are young teens to be thrust into that environment in such a manner, I don’t want to be putting them somewhere where they are forced into making decisions one way or another at such a young age.’
It’s a very good job they don’t go to school then 😉
Comment by Chris — 29 May 2005 @ 12:31 am
too bloody right 😉
Comment by Nic — 29 May 2005 @ 12:37 am
Not sure there really was a “big drugs and sex fest going on”. I didn’t see any dope-smoking (and I do usually notice, lol, but obviously Joyce was more observant than me in this instance) and I don’t think I even saw any snogging!
Comment by Alison — 29 May 2005 @ 12:39 am
I wasn’t there so this is very second hand. It seems to me that it is true as a generalisation to say that teens will experiment in a variety of areas.
That may include, variously, drink, drugs, sex, risk-taking, gratuitous law-breaking and crap dress sense.
But that is not what is at issue. What is at issue is whether parents should firstly condone this behaviour and secondly, facilitate it.
I don’t see why drugs is a special case and should be treated differently from any of the other idiotic things teenagers are prone to. If your teen’s experimention of choice was riding his/her mountain bike back and forth across a busy road, would you be prepared to load up the car and drive them to the A1 so they could better conduct their experimentation? Worse still, would you encourage them to wear flares? I think not.
I see it as my parental duty to point and laugh. 🙂
Comment by Tim — 29 May 2005 @ 1:33 am
Can’t be doing with the TCS approach myself. I reserve the right at all times to say “No you bloody can’t. Why? Because *I* say so. Now get to your room and stay there till you can behave!” And since reading Alison’s. I may even add a “and do two maths questions as well” to that approach. Works for me 😉
Comment by Joyce — 29 May 2005 @ 8:34 am
Oh I’ve written and rewritten a balanced and rational response about all parents drawing their own lines and we all have to make our choices etc. but when I looked at it, it looked like such a bland old piece of nothing, I can’t be ar*ed. Sorry. I liked what you wrote though. Certainly agree with Tim that parents should not facilitate or condone a range of activity including drug use. Their brains are still forming and vulnerable.
Comment by Ali — 29 May 2005 @ 12:11 pm
Whose brains, the parents’ or the children’s?
Comment by Tim — 29 May 2005 @ 2:51 pm
As the proud “owner” of a teen all I can say is I nag, cajole, educate, discuss, debate, inform and then pray, a lot!!!
Comment by Jenny — 29 May 2005 @ 5:54 pm
When I was a teenager,the last thing I would have wanted was my parents condoning, let alone facilitating, anything I did. Accepting that I was a rational individual was all I wanted really.
Nic, you are so secure in your knowledge *now* that Davies is intelligent, mature, articulate, his own person, etc – surely he’s only going to *grow* in those areas, not suddenly turn into a herd-following fuckwit the minute he turns 13? I honestly don’t really understand the concern. And the passages about your parents, your ‘experimentation’, your mistakes, and your lack of regrets really seem to undermine your position too 😉 (And yes, I did read the title of the post, lol!)
And hey, *I* wear flares 😉 Tbh, I’d rather my kids ‘rebelled’ in pretty much whatever fashion takes their fancy, than grow up looking and acting like the apparent mainstream I see every weekend in town.
Comment by Alison — 29 May 2005 @ 7:40 pm
I know, they are unbalanced witterings really – I never said they’d make sense 🙂
It is hard because the more I watch and learn and the more confident I become in both the kids’ as their own people and also my ability to give them all the skills they need to make their decisions once they need to the more it feels ‘right’ to relax about it all. I do know that I can’t protect them from everything, I do know that it was having the freedom to make my mistakes that makes me almost keen for them to make their own and learn from them. But I also read my teenage diaries (yes, I’ve *always* been a thinker and a jotter down of those random and often wandering thoughts!) and can’t help feeling if I could just prevent some of that heartache for them then I would.
Argh, I don’t know, it’s bloody hard work this parenting lark isn’t it? Maybe I should forget about fretting on stuff not due for another 10 years and spend more time dealing with toddler tantrums eh?!
I think HESFES was just the first time I have been in the company of lots of teens pretty much since I was one myself and all of the fuss on lists since we caem home had panicked me a bit with the realisation that I will have a couple of my own in a decade’s time.
Comment by Nic — 29 May 2005 @ 8:01 pm
OMG ALISON WEARS FLARES!!!! 🙂
Comment by Tim — 29 May 2005 @ 8:32 pm
pmsl 😀
Comment by Nic — 29 May 2005 @ 8:45 pm
http://liveotherwise.co.uk/makingitup/images/mm.jpg
Comment by Tim — 30 May 2005 @ 5:24 pm
I think Emma’s personality and quirky behaviours (shall we say for now LOL) pretty much take a big percentage of decision making out of her hands at the moment (mainly for safety reasons). I am having to make many more decisions than I thought I would have to for her at this stage even though she is only just coming up to 4. I am going to have to handle this area very carefully and let go bit by bit as and when I know she can handle/understand things. “We are all doing that” I hear you all shout – but first I have to literally teach her to know things before I can then let her decide on them. Talking comes naturally for most people in the world. It has really been odd having to literally teach her to talk. This time last year she couldn’t even nod or shake her head to say yes or no. If I hadn’t literally ‘taught’ her to do it she wouldn’t be able to do it now! Therefore, allowing her to make decisions about her life using ‘yes’ and ‘no’ is going to take a bit longer. It is the ‘understanding’ part that I have to be sure she knows before I can let her make a decision that is the most perplexing part.
Comment by Karen b — 30 May 2005 @ 5:50 pm
nanoo nanoo
Comment by Nic — 30 May 2005 @ 8:00 pm
Quite. 🙂
I think that Alison does look quite a bit like Mindy – not sure whether I can see Chris as Mork though.
Comment by Tim — 30 May 2005 @ 8:58 pm