Parenting is hard. Let me just begin with that general statement. I don’t care if you’re a stay at home parent, or work outside the home, a single parent, a co-parent, a younger parent, or an older parent. Raising another human is hard work. It’s a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week job, with no sick days and no days off. It’s hard, and anyone who tells you differently is either not doing a very good job, or lying.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that so much of conventional parenting advice seems to be aimed not at improving the life of the child, but at making things easier for the parent. Did you ever think about it? New moms are bombarded with information on how they should train their new child to sleep through the night … then Mom won’t have to get up with baby anymore, and she won’t be as tired. They’re given tips and fancy methods of ensuring their child is potty trained by 23 months, because they shouldn’t have to worry about fussing with diapers for a day more than 2 years. They’re advised to plan naps around their schedule, to put kids in a time-out when they “misbehave”, and to completely ignore them when they have a tantrum.
Here’s the thing: No one ever said that parenting is supposed to be convenient. It’s not. Good parenting is messy. It’s real. It’s hands-on. It’s in the middle of the night, and it’s in the middle of a crowded supermarket.
Yes, it would be easier if kids slept through the night from the get-go. But not only do very few babies naturally sleep through the night, they are not designed to do so. They have tiny bellies, and they get hungry frequently. They get lonely. They get they scared. They want the warmth and comfort of their mom. It’s our job to be there for them, to love and care for them …. day and night.
Yes, it would be easier not to change diapers for 3 years, but some children simply aren’t ready before then. It’s our job to be respectful of their needs, of their bodies, and of their individual time table.
Yes, it would be easier if we could plan our days around conveniently scheduled nap times and eating times and play times. But kids aren’t robots for us to program. They’re people. Just like us, they have their own internal mechanism telling them when they are hungry and when they are tired, and also like ours, it ebbs and flows with the changing seasons. It’s not our job to expect our kids to fit neatly into our own unchanged lives, but to remain flexible, and patient, and recognize that once we have children we need to change from a couple dynamic to a family dynamic… one in which every voice matters.
Yes, it would be easier to make a whole bunch of rules, to never have to worry about our children straying or getting hurt or getting themselves in trouble. But children need to play. They need freedom. They need parents who support them and cheer for them. Parents who help them when they need it, and give them space when they do not.
Yes, it would be easier not to deal with the tantrums and the difficult moments. It would be easier to lose our patience, to send the offending party to his or her room, and to dole out an arbitrary (and unnecessary) punishment. But doing so does not help your child OR you. It doesn’t help your relationship.
Being a mindful and conscious parent means doing just that: being there. It means being there, right there in the moment, and not taking the easy way out. It means counting to ten (or fifty or 172) so that you don’t respond in anger. It means getting down on your child’s level, and talking to him or her. It means being kind and empathetic. It means treating your child the way you yourself would like to be treated. (I don’t know about you, but I would not like to be ignored or banished to another room to when I was upset about something. I would want to be heard, and I would want to know that someone cared. ) It means apologizing when you screw up – because you will screw up – and it means standing up and being a parent even during the hard moments. The uncomfortable moments. The moments when you’re tired and cranky and oh so tempted to fall back on “easy.”
Being the kind of parent I want to be isn’t easy. It’s hard. Some days it’s very hard. But I don’t think something that important should be easy. It should take work, and commitment, and love, and heart, and a really good sense of humor. If you’re moving from an authoritarian style of parenting to one based on partnership I can’t tell you that there won’t be good days and bad days, and I can’t tell you that you won’t sometimes feel like you’re taking one step forward and two steps back. But I can tell you – promise you even – that it will be worth it. Good relationships with your kids (or with anyone for that matter) are always worth it.
And that is so much better than easy.
