Not like my mother!

When I became a parent, like many young people, I had a goal to parent my own way…to do differently than various parts of my mother’s parenting.  We don’t always see eye to eye.  The funny thing is that I think many of the highlights that bother me were in reaction to her own sense of, “Not like my mother!”

I’m new at this business of being a large family.  My mom had two children, technically, but we’re almost a decade apart.  So, according to the people who write books on how birth order shapes your personality, my brother and I were only children.  I only have a few memories of sibling interactions (mostly rivalry) before he went off to college, and although we get along as adults now, we barely keep in touch.  I hope my kids grow up a little closer, even the ones that are so far apart in age. I haven’t a clue what sibling relationships should look like, but I’m learning.

So anyway, I guess that explains why my mother seems to be completely overwhelmed by my children.  I don’t think they’re necessarily harder to deal with; there’s just more of them at once.  Somehow my mom got used to raising just one child at a time, and really struggles to multi-task.  Meanwhile I’m constantly scanning the room, counting heads in public, reminding them how to treat one another, triaging whatever is going on at any given moment.  You’d never guess that my mom was the middle child in a large family…

That’s right.  Grandma was one of many herself, and birthed enough children for her family to be considered conspicuously large even in a rural farming community over half a century ago.  My mom had about half a dozen younger siblings, as well as older ones. You’d think I could learn a lot about large family dynamics just from my own kin. Unfortunately, Grandma passed away of old age before my oldest child was even born.  Mom doesn’t talk much about Gram’s parenting.  It was just how life was. A few things leak out in hushed whispers amongst my aunts…don’t want to speak ill of the dead…but I gather that Grandma was fairly harsh as a parent.  Punishment was physical and swift, and the older kids did more than just chores, they went out and got paying jobs at an early age.  Grandma seemed like a nice enough lady by the time I got to know her, so I’d guess that she was just doing her best to survive the responsiblity of raising many, as best she knew how.

My mom set out to do the opposite.  She swore that I’d never have to carry the bulk of the household chores; that I’d have time to be a kid and just play and study.  I didn’t really have any responsibilities, though.  I went to college practically unable to boil water, and it was my divorced dad who taught me how to cook and wash my own laundry. I was 20 when I held my first significant job besides occasional babysitting and such.

Mom was so determined to be less strict that she was actually rather permissive.  She was the cool aunt who occasionally took in my teenage cousins when they went through periods of rebellion.  I was the daughter of the cool aunt.  My rebellion was to actually MARRY my high school sweetheart instead of just moving in.  It was a very odd dynamic of having to set my own standards, and yet I still struggle with shame…for the few vague things mom did try to enforce, like “Don’t make a scene,” the main tactic that she could come up was verbal shaming.  Well, it wasn’t physical punishment.  She never meant for it to have such a profound effect on my self-esteem.

My goal for my family is to figure out how to have high standards without being legalistic or shaming.  How to be both kind and firm.  I want to discipline my children by discipling them–by teaching them how to behave properly, teaching them right from wrong without shaming them AND without hitting them.  And this is how I came to gentle discipline and Grace-Based Discipline.

It’s not like my mother…if anything, I recognize the permissive-punitive pendulum in which setting the standards too low results in snapping at the kids when mama gets fed up with behavior that shouldn’t have been permitted in the first place.  It’s not a return to my grandmother’s large family parenting either.  There’s no grace in punishing the kids for being kids.  Somehow, I need to find the patience to teach firmly over and over again, to raise good children without resorting to parental behavior that is the opposite of how I want my children to act!

And as for the logistics…I really don’t want to my children to go off into the world as unprepared as I was.  I don’t want them to feel like I’m not shouldering my own share of the household, and I don’t want my daughters to feel like homemaking and caretaking are their only possible callings in life.  Likewise, though, I don’t want them to feel like a career out of the home is the only possibility, either.  I want to equip my kids for all the seasons of adulthood, and the training starts now.  In fact, it has to start now, because one mama doing all the work for a family of six (four kids, two adults) doesn’t cut it.  But we have a saying around here for times when a child tries to procrastinate on schoolwork by engaging in a household task instead…”Only YOU can do YOUR homework…Mama can do her own tasks without your help, or it can still be here later when you’re done with that chapter.”

Wish me luck, my friends, as I figure out how to navigate this…”Not like my mother!”