One of my most beloved activities as a child was peeling long strips of paint (most likely lead-based paint) off our concrete basement walls (in our leaky, mildewy playroom). We would then collect the paint chips and mix them in a bowl with water to make “oatmeal”. We probably even microwaved this concoction in a bowl made entirely of BPA.
And yes I survived (with very few facial ticks).
🙂
Seriously though… my parents were generally there to make sure that me and my 4 siblings didn’t cut off our fingers or run away with the circus. That was pretty much the parenting gig back in those days. Then they shooed us off to our rooms and forced us to listen to them and their friends downstairs drinking wine and yukking it up while we laid in our bunkbed prison yearning for adulthood.
Fast forward to now and…. Holy spastic parenting cow! Suffice to say, times have changed.
Nowadays, we have kid-sanctioned no-slip, chemical free bowls for our kids. All of our outlets stay covered until elementary school. We are literally “wearing” our babies and making our own organic baby food. We fork out hundreds of dollars to enroll our little drooler in baby yoga (please, if you’re going to pay money for your baby to catch a cold, just give it to me (your money that is, not your baby)). A run-of-the-mill fight with our spouse is cause for days of guilt over the scars our frightfully raised voices left on the poor darlings.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve subscribed to it, too (and certainly believe a lot of it to have merit). But good grief, I had no idea what I was in for when I started having kids. I didn’t know about this psychotic parenting movement I’d be thrust into. All I knew was that, as soon as the first one was born, my perfectionist side of me started rubbing her wily little hands together and cackling maniacally as she consumed books, articles, podcasts and advice from the all-you-can-eat parenting-expert buffet.
And let me tell you, the list of what-to-do’s became inexhaustible. Don’t get me started on the list of what-not-to-do’s.
Case in point: I recently read that it is now taboo to say “Good job” to our kids.
Good job!? Apparently saying such a careless phrase conditions the poor butterflies to believe that any job is a good job as long as mom or dad say so and that if we don’t say so, they must not have, in fact done a good job. Instead we’re supposed to say “Good effort”. Can you imagine? You score the winning soccer goal and all your mom can manage is an antiseptic “Good effort, Wally!” (Hopefully your name is Wally).
Oh and don’t even think about telling your daughter that she is pretty. Because, if one day she grows one of those pimples that looks like a horn in the middle of her forehead, her ever-loving self esteem will go right out the window. And just forget about anything pink or princess-y for your girls, Moms. That’s off the list too. We don’t want to pigeonhole our budding little Women’s rights activists!
Oh and telling your kid they’re smart… Big no-no. It puts performance pressure on them that will surely backfire and turn them into apathetic losers who eventually just stop trying to measure up to that “smart” label you’ve so callously slapped on their backs.
Come on now.
These over-cooked parenting formulas paint our kids as non-thinking robots who can’t differentiate an encouraging word from an end-all be-all character trait that they must surely possess until they die. Personally, I think this is not giving our kids enough credit. They’re smarter than that.
-With a caveat-
I say, go ahead tell your kid he’s smart. But make sure to supplement that compliment with a lot of words about how the effort that we put into things is what really makes us good at them. And maybe tell him he’s dumb every once in a while just to keep him guessing. (KIDDING!).
And go ahead and tell your little Lucy Jane that she’s pretty when she’s wearing her pink polka dot dress. Tell her she looks like a beautiful princess simply because you know that would tickle her pink…or brown. Because this is where her little imagination gets indulged and she is off in another land fighting dragons and kissing frogs and frolicking with magical donkeys. But also make sure to tell her that what is most beautiful about her is her kind and compassionate heart. Don’t forget to tell her that you love her beautiful eyes because they see other people when they’re hurting and always try to help.
Listen, we can’t raise our kids for 18 years with a set of perfectly cultivated word choices. Kids are so so smart and they see through all that malarkey anyway. What they know is intention and what they KNOW is what we believe according to how we live and by the words and actions that fill in the gaps between our parenting mistakes and sometimes superficially lavish compliments. I believe that kids, like every other person on the planet, perceives the nonverbal communication 5X more than anything else.
So say the things that need to be said and keep striving to be the parent that you want your kid to grow up having, and in the meantime, be your most beautiful self and I think it’ll all come out in the wash. In fact, I bet our kids will also grow up to have very few facial ticks.