Other People’s Parenting Skills…
Adam and I had dinner at friends’ house on Sunday. Super neat, ecclectic people who we don’t get to see often enough. The wife blogs on about 27 different sites it seems, and we got the addresses to them. One of them is about her kids and parenting and appreciating that we can use all the parental advice we can get, I checked it out. She’s got great kids, so she must be doing something right.
One of the posts was about the incident with the mother and her kids were kicked off a plane because the kids were unruly. I had read that story in the news as I’m sure most everyone who reads the news has. My friend rants about how parents don’t discipline their kids, and if they’re unruly or out of control, it’s got to be someone else’s fault. Well, of course I’m thinking something along the lines of just how much I agree with that, and I’m going to post a comment…and… then I stop and think.
There I go again criticizing someone else’s parenting skills. Except for a weekend visit or two with a niece or two, we haven’t had one, much to less two or three kids for more than 48 hours at a time. I haven’t experienced being worn down by the constant needs-meeting that kids require. Maybe I should put myself in that woman’s shoes before criticizing, etc. My friend has 3 kids, she has earned the right to say what she really thinks. What right do I have?
Maybe this isn’t a good example. It’s common sense that if your kids don’t have discipline and if you blame the rest of the world for everything that happens to them, then your kids are not going to grow up with the skills needed to be well rounded members of society. It’s kind of obvious what happened regarding the plane incident. What about when you go to the store or in a restaurant, and little Junior is throwing a temper tantrum. What happened that led to the tantrum? What if Mom gives in and gets little Junior what he wants? Is Mom a pushover, or is Mom just exhausted and at her limit of sanity? What if Mom turns little Junior over her knee and spanks him? What would I do in that situation? What would Adam do?
Not too long ago, Adam and I had a talk about this. There was a little kid like little Junior, being unruly, but was basically being a little kid. Adam was unglued. When we talked about it later, we figured out it wasn’t that little Junior was being unruly, and in fact he was just being a little kid. It was that little Junior’s father doesn’t want to parent his own kids, which makes his mother run herself ragged. It’s a huge pet peeve of ours when fathers refuse to watch their own kids - we know so many people like that and we’ve had to bite our tongues. Frankly, I don’t think a father like that is much of a father, or even a real man for that matter. With very few exceptions, there’s no reason for it. I don’t care if the wife is a stay at home mom or even if the parents aren’t married. Parenting should be a team sport. Dudes who actually parent their kids rock in my book. Seeing a big strong guy with an itty bitty baby and a bottle in his arms makes me melt. I don’t have to be a parent to have that opinion!!! Thank the Lord all the important men in my life are REAL men.
On another note, I want to say something about what I wrote a couple blogs ago about what we are doing regarding our children’s racial identity and the rest of the community. I don’t think I was clear in that I can not stress enough how supportive our immediate family, and our close friends, have been. All the people who count in our lives are there for us. There’s already a waiting list on who gets to babysit. On the other hand, we weren’t singling anyone out. The basic message I was trying to get across was that we would be doing our kids a huge disservice if we did not recognize that the rest of the world isn’t necessarily going to be that supportive in our decision, and they aren’t going to see us as a family, and that we have to educate ourselves so we can prepare our kids for that. We can’t just blindly say that we don’t see color. That doesn’t mean they are going to be any less our kids and that we are going to love them any less, and of course we know our family and close friends aren’t going to love them any less. It means that even though we don’t yet know who they are, we already love them so much that we want to make sure they are prepared to live in this imperfect world around them.