- Pics from our very indulgent vacation we just got back from…
My children and us were having a conversation last night. We were saying that when they have kids, we will be that child’s grandparent and we will be able to say “you did that when you were a kid” when they complain to us about things. Oscar stated he would be a better parent than us. I said “are we not good parents” to which he replied “yes, but I’ll be better”. I asked what he would do differently and finally, after some coaxing since he knew I was slightly offended, he came up with “I would let them do more things they wanted to”. That’s when I decided to let them in on a little life secret.
I turned to him and said “I’m going to let you know about a super secret parenting fact that, for some reason, parents don’t usually tell their kids. I love you guys more than ANYTHING in the world and nothing, I mean NOTHING makes be happier than seeing you guys happy. But, as a parent, it’s my job to make sure you guys turn out to be good people and respectable adults. If I were to give you everything you want, which I WANT to, you would expect everyone and the world to treat you the same way. You would be one of those awful people who only think about themselves and are spoiled and get super mad when things don’t go their way. I want you all to be loving, giving, compassionate people and sometimes that means dealing with not getting everything you want. In the real world, you’ll go into a job and be expected to get things done in a timely manner – including getting your shoes on – and if you don’t, you’ll get fired. The other reason is that you are children and I’m an adult with almost 40 years of experience and I know outcomes of some of the things you think you want. I have to keep you protected from hurting yourselves or being unhealthy”
Parenting is SO hard and not just because you’re exhausted from being a servant to three little piglets (to a certain age) or trying to wrap your brain around the decisions their little primordial brains make, but mostly trying to decide what you should take care of and what you should not. If parenting were just being a servant to a demanding little idiot, it would be tiring, frustrating, hair pulling, but I think what makes parenting harder on the next level is allowing them to make that decision you would have stopped and letting them learn why it was stupid. A good parent knows that the best way to learn is to experience it yourself, but it’s SO hard to sit there and comfort the tears that you could easily fix, but stop yourself for the lesson learned.
Once, Oscar wanted a watch SOOOOO bad – he picked it out – it was a Pokemon watch (like $10 ) and he loved it! One day he came home crying because he had lost it at school. He had taken it off to wash his hands in the bathroom and left it and when he came back, it was gone. Oscar is my most sensitive child and I love that about him, so watching him cry over this was heart wrenching. All I wanted to do was grab my keys and run out right then and replace it for him. But instead I had to hold him and explain about responsibility and loss while he cried even harder that I wouldn’t get him a new one, ripping my heart in two.
Losing something as small (not in his mind) as a $10 watch that he’d had for a whopping 2 weeks is a much preferred lesson on loss than other things he could and will lose in his life and dealing with loss is a very important lesson in life – processing the emotions and the grief and acceptance, learning lessons from what could have been done differently – slowly builds an emotional maturity ready to better handle the world. Hopefully, now when he’s 30 and his favorite coffee mug breaks, he’ll be sad, but he won’t fall on the floor and think the world has come to an end or worse, scream at his child for knocking off the counter.
So, kids, just know that we are bound by our duty to make you into decent adults and even though we’d love nothing more than to stop your tears with new things and watch your faces light up, we have to make hard decisions about what we can indulge you with and what just needs to be a life lesson. And thanks to this lesson, my kids are very familiar with the Rolling Stones “You Can’t Always Get What you Want”
