A proud and happy mother wrote to me about her family a week ago. It seemed sudden to her – “where did the time go,” she asked – but her two daughters are now young adults.
They are about to marry two young men whom she and the girls’ father also love and admire.
She talked about specific decisions she and her husband had made to raise their daughters. Their first decision was about their biggest goal, namely, to make their daughters’ childhoods different from their own.
Many other conscious decisions flowed from that, including where they turned for support and what kinds of disciplines they would use.
They considered exactly how to encourage their daughters to develop certain values and guided and supported their children’s spiritual growth.
They thought early on about the time they would invest in their relationship with their children. They also planned ways to support their daughters’ time investments
Without meaning to, her letter reminded me how most of every day is spent by most people without conscious decisions. That fact is at least as true for parents as for any other group of people.
She reminded me why big decisions are so important.
When parents shop for a new home, for example, one big decision is what school their children will go to. It has to do with the quality of education their children will get, of course. But, it’s also about their children’s comfort and everyday companions.
A lot of everyday things flow out of that conscious decision, and everyday things add up.
Sometimes day-to-day results add up quickly and in bright colors. When children say they love their new school or a teacher says something nice to a parent about their child, it is a bright color.
Sometimes there are bright signals of a problem.
One teacher who worked with children needing reading help was an example. When asked, he had no idea what reading book one of his students was working in, and couldn’t find it in his own records.
It was a brightly colored signal and, although the cause wasn’t apparent, the problem required a conscious decision. That time the next decision moved one child to another teacher.
A mother decided to ignore her young teenage daughter’s report that a grown man had touched her sexually. For reasons we can only estimate, she asked her daughter to lie about the incident. That brightly colored signal warns of serious family problems – past, present and future.
But, most times the signals don’t show up as quickly or as brightly. Children and the adults who care for them make small adjustments one at time to situations, even bad situations. In that way, we are like the famous frog who sat quietly in lukewarm water while it was slowly heated to a boil. It didn’t notice the signals.
Some of the support that parents used to have for their decisions doesn’t exist anymore. Parents used to depend on schools and neighborhoods to support their beliefs and values. For many reasons, that set of protections is now pretty flawed.
For one thing, children and teenagers have a wider range of contacts with age mates. They have more communications and are more mobile. With cell phones, text messaging and instant messaging, teenagers spend as much time as they want with friends from all over. Much of peer culture happens under the nose of parents, but largely out of their sight.
Most parents report that they just don’t have the time they would like to be with their children. Most parents work outside the home, and spend large amounts of time commuting.
The parents’ decisions must be made even more consciously, more deliberately than before. Later columns will talk about what those decisions might be, but the mother’s letter is a good and practical start.
Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked as director of clinical programs at Luther Child Center in Everett. He is on the Snohomish County Child Death Review Committee and the Advisory Board for the Tulalip Children’s Advocacy Center. You can send e-mail to bill@billfrance.com.
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