Tips on Parenting

Sometimes it’s surprising that the divorce rate isn’t actually higher than it is (about 46% in the U.S.). Assuming it isn’t just inertia on the part of the 54%, it’s a tribute to the willingness of so many couples to work out their differences.

Fortunately, most parents will agree on one thing: the children should not be put in the middle of these conflicts. Avoiding that result requires skill, maturity, tact and compromise.

To work out reasonably consistent policies to cover the thousands of different real-life experiences of family life requires careful thought. It also takes a willingness to be frank about what each partner wants and views as fair. It requires buckets of honesty.

Each parent needs to be willing to face reality and be reasonable. That’s difficult to do in states of high emotion and about subjects that are important like those involving how to raise children. Just as in society in general, when one party simply bulls another to achieve a short-term gain the result is frustration, injured feelings and often a violation of simple justice.

A willingness to recognize, despite anger or irritation, that the other party has a valid point of view and a vested interest in the outcome, requires considerable objectivity. But objectivity doesn’t have to mean emotional or value neutrality, simply a willingness to see things as they are.

One thing that will help encourage that objectivity is the realization that each party has an equal stake in the larger issue – the welfare of the child.

That shared interest can form the basis of a mutual effort to discuss different evaluations, background that may be exerting biasing factors and other barriers to a satisfactory arrangement. But when each party makes a sincere effort (or more accurately, repeated efforts), such resolutions are possible.

Successful marriages are fundamentally those in which each partner genuinely admires and cares for the other. That forms the basis of respect that children both observe and absorb over time. That respect and admiration makes it possible to see the larger picture and longer-term goal – a compromise that doesn’t simply leave both parties exhausted or unfulfilled.

Mature parents will ultimately realize that no single disagreement is likely to be so important that it’s worth harming the happiness of the family members. You don’t burn the house down because you don’t like the color of the drapes. Respectful parents will see that one may get his or her way this time, but the next time the partners point of view will prevail.

Few concrete objects or circumstances are so important that no compromise is possible. What time to have dinner, or how clean the house should be, or what time the child should be home from outdoor activities, or even what college to attend… the list is endless. But only in the rarest of cases is it overwhelmingly important that one point of view must prevail for all time.

In every case listed, and many more, it’s healthy to try one person’s preference, then experiment with another if the results are less than satisfactory. Viewing the process as ongoing allows each parent to feel his or her values are respected.

The child benefits doubly from this. He or she gains the best possible outcome, discovered by experience. The child also sees that Mom and Dad can disagree while still respecting one another’s points of view. The child sees honesty and reason at work in an atmosphere of admiration and love. The latter may well be the best lesson of all.

Parents understandably want to do everything possible to protect their children from harm. Today, that often includes – some would say is first and foremost – teaching them to be wary of others. Parents will often instill a (healthy, they would argue) fear of others, along with providing practical tips on staying safe.

While the attitude is understandable, in light of the many news stories to which they are exposed, it’s possible for parents to go overboard and do harm along with the good.

Childhood attitudes about other people tend to persist into adulthood. It’s a rare individual who is sufficiently enlightened that they can entirely erase incorrect views of others learned early in life. As a result, parents – while taking reasonable precautions against real risks – will want to carefully consider the extent and manner of their warnings about strangers.

The first difficulty parents encounter, though they are sometimes unaware of it, is the difference in the meaning of ’stranger’ for the parent and the child. To a child, the person behind the counter at a local store may not be a stranger. They’ve seen Mom talk to him many times.

Still, children are often capable of finer distinctions than adults give them credit for. They can, beyond the age of three or so, be taught that looks alone don’t define who is or isn’t a stranger. Just because the elderly man looks ‘nice’ doesn’t make him not a stranger.

Also, they can be taught that there are circumstances where seeking the aid of a stranger is safe and reasonable. If they become separated from the parent in the library, the teenager wearing an employee badge and pushing a cart of books who directs them to the front desk shouldn’t necessarily be regarded fearfully.

Parents are right to be concerned, but they should also try to be objective. Objective does not mean being emotionally or value neutral. It simply means assessing facts honestly and without bias.

Some relevant facts:

• Most child abductions and harm originate from someone familiar to the child such as a relative or neighbor
• Only a very small percentage of children are abducted or harmed by strangers
• Those abducted or harmed tend more often to be children who display fear or lack of confidence when approached by strangers. Also, those who travel alone are more at risk

Good data is difficult to obtain, owing to an array of different definitions of criminal abduction. Approx. 58,000 children per year are abducted by non-family members. Most are returned within 24 hours. That’s a horrifying tragedy for those parents, but it does mean the odds are low.

However, it’s understood that since the consequences can be so severe, parents will want to take precautions even against this unlikely event.

Long term harm to a person’s view of others can result from succumbing to media-induced paranoia. There are several, reasonable precautions parents often learn in order to protect their children. Teaching children to travel in groups, to stay at arms length when a person appears mistrustful, to run away and/or say ‘NO!’ loudly and continually when a stranger attempts to lead them away and other common practices are healthy and reasonable.

At the same time, parents should attempt to instill a sense of confidence in dealing with the world – a world that includes strangers. The alternative risks raising children who have never been harmed to have the same fear as those who have.

Pinpointing the beginning date of homeschooling is actually impossible. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great ‘at home’ over 2,500 years ago. In fact, until the late 19th century, nearly everyone was ‘homeschooled’. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that states began passing laws compelling parents to send their children to public schools.

But the modern movement can be fairly closely approximated as beginning in the mid-1960s, from three very different sources. John Holt was a counter-culture figure who wrote extensively on education for 20 years. The other major source was the author Raymond Moore, whose concern grew out of his religious views. The third, indirectly, was the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, whose ideas gave birth to the modern libertarian movements, of which homeschooling (of one type) is a part.

John Holt coined the term ‘unschooling’, an approach that eschews curricula, schedules and any kind of structured method for educating a child. Seeing that children are naturally curious, and observing that public school more often dampens that spirit than encourages it, he advocated eliminating all structure.

Beginning with his first book, How Children Fail, published in 1964, Holt viewed the public school system as largely authoritarian. Himself an Ivy League graduate and a teacher in alternative schools, he sought at first to reform the public education system. He later came to believe that reform was impossible, given the nature of public schools. In 1977 he founded Growing Without Schooling, a popular bimonthly magazine resource for homeschoolers.

Raymond Moore came at the problem from a very different approach. A devout Christian and an ex-missionary, he saw in the public school system an entire philosophy that taught values opposed to his religion. He believed that education involved more than just providing facts. He saw the violence and other negative aspects of public schools and advocated that parents resume responsibility for their child’s education and, in particular, value instruction.

Though not a writer on education, apart from a few essays, Ayn Rand’s work inspired a great many in the 1960s and later and held similar views about the public education system. Those sympathetic to her views founded a political party that has long been opposed to any form of public, state-sponsored education, particularly if it’s compulsory.

But the libertarians inspired by Rand went beyond this negative. They advocated positive steps to restore to education the focus of educating the individual rational mind possessed by every child. As with every broad movement, individual views differ but the emphasis on individual freedom and the development of rational creativity is central to this branch of the homeschooling movement.

All three of these widely varying starting points grew in tandem throughout the latter half of the 20th century, continuing today. Despite their radically different philosophies all have some things in common. All hold that the public school system has and will continue to fail to deliver quality education in a safe, encouraging environment. All advocate putting the child’s intellectual and moral development at the center of the educational process.

The history of homeschooling demonstrates the success of that point of view, and promises a continued bright future.

Adopting a child may be both a long train of practical and emotional nightmares and the fulfillment of a dream.

About 1% of all children in the U.S. were adopted. Thus, though the percentage may be small, the total number is considerable – in the millions. While, fortunately, many of the traditional stigmas have faded, adoption and raising adopted children remains a uniquely challenging process for millions of parents.

Many psychologists who specialize in such issues can report from their files such heartrending statements as:

“We knew this child would be different from us. But sometimes it seems we don’t know him at all.” or,

“Sometimes we just look at each other and ask what we got ourselves into?”

Many everyday, practical issues are more difficult to handle in adoption scenarios. Lack of knowledge of heredity in relation to medical problems, prior bad parenting or even abuse can seem to make understanding present problems more difficult.

Children who discover unexpectedly that they are adopted – especially from someone other than the adoptive parent – can feel (often without any input from others) that they are somehow less than fully loved and wanted. How and when to inform young children that they have been adopted presents a unique challenge to adoptive parents.

While no ‘one size fits all’ prescription for dealing with adoption issues can hope to be realistic, some general suggestions may help parents better cope with their special difficulties.

Parents who make the effort to endure the long and painful bureaucracy and expense that too often accompanies adoption should take pride in having persisted. Keeping the end goal in mind is difficult in the midst of so many needless hurdles, and those who do so are entitled to feel good about it.

Dealing with a child’s medical problems is trying enough for any parent, but adoptive parents sometimes feel frustrated and fear being unable to cope. Some comfort may be had by realizing that hereditary information is only one small part of diagnosis. Physicians effectively treat unconscious victims, emergency cases and a wide variety of other patients in circumstances where such information is not available nor particularly useful.

Some value may be had also in realizing that psychological issues can and do arise about as frequently with biological children. Except in cases of actual abuse, former experiences are only a small part of the cause of what a child is presently feeling.

As adoptive parents know, the bonds that form between parent and child form very quickly and very deep. Both common experience and formal studies show that such relationships are as strong and lasting as biologically-based parent-child bonds.

That suggests that the relationships and their value to parent and child are as much the consequence of choice as of biology. Indeed, since they are chosen by the parent, both parties can benefit from the advantages such arrangements offer.

Adoptive parents can revel in and express with joy to their child that ‘you were chosen’. This is not recommended in families of mixed adopted and biological children. Biological children should not be given the message that they were not chosen, nor should adopted children be encouraged in a view that they are superior to the other children for having been adopted.

Parents and child can each enjoy the many benefits of family life, the overwhelming majority of which have little or nothing to do with biological relations. Whether the specific child was the offspring of that particular parent or not, the pride of guiding and the joy of learning is the same. The special emotional bonds among family members transcends how the parties met.

Sibling rivalry – conflict between and among brothers and sisters – can take all the forms that occur among adults: loud arguments, sports competition, physical fights, property destruction, etc. As the list suggests, some forms will require parental intervention, while others may be safely left to the kids to work out for themselves.

The first key element in helping brothers and sisters resolve conflicts is to use what is beneficial from adult life, times ten. Children, of all ages above about three or so, are keenly sensitive to issues of justice and fairness.

Like adults, some children will engage in bad behavior based on wrong choices. Rarely do they have the awareness or experience of the moral dimension that adults are capable of, but neither are they (over a certain age) completely unaware of the distinction between right and wrong.

How the adult helps them clarify those issues will play a large part in how they develop.

Kids can engage in as many kinds of conflict as adults. Not having full responsibility for their choices, they need the guidance of adults if those conflicts are to be turned to advantage and not simply be a dead loss.

The importance of respect for the safety, property and individual choice of others can serve as a good basis for guiding adults in resolving their children’s conflicts. Just as in the larger society around them, kids can learn from an early age that there are boundaries no one may reasonably cross.

By the same token, just as in adult interactions, there are some conflicts that it is simply best to ignore, allowing the two parties to resolve on their own. Even children need the space to express thoughts and emotions, and the freedom to take actions based on choices – provided those choices don’t cross the line into physical harm or property destruction.

Naturally, no child younger than a teen can be expected to exhibit the impulse control, nor the intellectual understanding we expect of adults. But avoiding the false alternative of ‘well, kids will be kids’ is equally desirable, if the child is to grow into a mature, healthy adult.

As a case in point, a recent news program carried a story about ‘fight clubs’ – loosely organized (largely male) clubs whose members engaged in physical fights that went well beyond ordinary teen rough housing. The mother of one member who had recently been seriously injured excused her knowledge of the activities by declaring that ‘boys will be boys’. Such casual responses quickly evolve to ‘criminals will be criminals’.

Parents can avoid those results by exploring early on in their children’s lives the roots of conflicts between and among brothers and sisters. Many of the same basic factors that play out in adult rivalry are present from an early age.

Failure to focus on reality over indulgence in whims, difficulty in impulse control or to accept payment for achieving longer term goals by foregoing immediate rewards and many other shortcomings of ‘emotional intelligence’ are often at the root of such conflicts.

It isn’t necessary to be harsh or physical, when teaching children that honesty, respect for others and self-control are positive values. Guiding the child to understand that such things are actually in the child’s long-term self-interest will make the child’s nature your ally.

The best way to start demonstrating that is by allowing the child to see that the parents themselves resolve differences in just that way.

In considering homeschooling, a kind of do-it-yourself education, one of the first questions to ask is: Who is the ‘you’ in ‘yourself’? Parents have busy lives, earning a living and pursuing other important values that benefit them and their children. Making time for giving a proper education at home, especially for single parents, can be difficult. What to do?

Fortunately, parents have many options for providing homeschooling to their children. Over a million are homeschooled every year, so clearly many parents have discovered ways to make it work for them. Those ways are as diverse as the parents themselves.

In many cases, a traditional, two-parent arrangement makes the choice straightforward. One parent works outside the home, the other works in the home, including assuming primary responsibility for homeschooling the children. Many of those couples chose homeschooling because of dissatisfaction with the values being taught, implicitly or otherwise, in public schools.

But that traditional arrangement – male breadwinner, female caring for the home – is far from the only choice made today. Since the 1960s, the spectrum has broadened. Role reversals, same-sex couples, extended families and much more are in the mix today. Those alternatives can represent a benefit to the homeschooled child, since it makes possible choosing the person best capable of providing the education.

Many families, whether single-parent, same-sex, traditional or otherwise, have invited an older relative or friend into the home. An arrangement that, in fact, harkens back to a much older tradition. History repeats itself. Whether an older aunt or uncle, a grandparent or a friend needing housing, that person often has a lifetime of valuable experience. Such individuals can make excellent homeschool education providers.

Today, the homeschooling movement has reached an age that makes possible second generation education. Those who were homeschooled themselves are often the best persons to provide a homeschool education to another.

Those who endured a public school education can have valuable life lessons to convey, since they know what not to do. But that’s only half the solution. It’s necessary to have a positive to offer. Those who had only a public school education may fall back on the only methods they know.

Neighbors can provide homeschooling. Many ’stay-at-home’ Moms provide childcare services, since they can supervise more than one child. Those services can go beyond simply ‘babysitting’, however. They incorporate homeschooling, as well, in some instances.

A busy parent can also choose something that is even newer in homeschooling, yet goes back centuries in fact: a tutor. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. But it isn’t necessary to be wealthy (or royalty) to be able to afford a tutor.

Other countries, and other periods of history, have used tutors as the primary education giver. In fact, the public school system – modeled after the Prussian system of the 1800s – is a relatively recent experiment, one that has largely failed.

Tutors come in all ages, shapes and backgrounds. Some are specialists in a particular area, such as music or languages. Others have a broad background. Some are ex-public or private school teachers who grew dissatisfied with the system, yet retain a love for teaching.

Parents often believe, initially, that they can’t afford a private tutor for homeschooling their children. But many times they find, after researching the hours required and evaluating their own abilities and personality, that their time is better spent elsewhere. That time could be used to run a home-based business, so they’re still involved with the child at home, while the primary education is provided by a tutor.

Some parents find, in the case of fairly motivated, independent children, that homeschooling takes less time than they thought. Students are provided with guidance and resources and largely teach themselves. That makes tutoring a less expensive proposition, or one that may not be needed at all. Such students often become those at the top of any class in college since their love for learning is self-generated.

Explore all the options before deciding that homeschooling won’t work for you.