My father once said about being a parent that it is the only thing you do that requires a very long period of learning, and at about the time that you are becoming competent, you don’t need the skills anymore. Notwithstanding this modest assessment of their parenting skills, they were wonderful parents.
Many people think that discipline is the essence of parenting. But that isn’t parenting. Parenting is not telling your child what to do when he or she misbehaves. Parenting is providing the conditions in which a child can realize his or her full human potential.
I had three children while doing a show, as demanding as ‘Good Morning America,’ so this is – you know, it’s almost like I’m less daunted about motherhood, and parenting at this point in time. And I think I’m just much more fit and healthy than I was 20-years-ago.
Most moms and dads, they want to be good moms and dads. But it’s an incredibly hard job when you are stressed out, when you are poor, when your life is in chaos. And giving them some of the tools to be better parents, to whittle away at that parenting gap, gives those kids a much better starting point in life.
Kids are a great analogy. You want your kids to grow up, and you don’t want your kids to grow up. You want your kids to become independent of you, but it’s also a parent’s worst nightmare: That they won’t need you. It’s like the real tragedy of parenting.
I think a generation ago, dads went to work, they came home, and they had their dinner, had a drink, and then went to bed. I don’t know what it was like in your house, but that is how it was in mine. I think it is cool to have the dads in the trenches and doing the real parenting work.
We all, as parents, are laughing at ourselves and helicopter parenting and saying, ‘This isn’t the way we were parented; we were allowed to run free.’ When I talk to my friends, we are all fascinated by what we are doing, but we can’t seem to stop ourselves.
Around a third of parents still worry that they will look like a bad mother or father if their child has a mental health problem. Parenting is hard enough without letting prejudices stop us from asking for the help we need for ourselves and our children.
My parents have always had this philosophy that overindulging your children is one of the worst things you could do as a parent. It’s something that was hammered into my head growing up. And while my mom and dad are not professional authorities on parenting, I can confirm from experience that they had a point.
In response to our fast-food culture, a ‘slow food’ movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.
We put more emphasis on who can drive a car than on who can be a parent. And I think there ought to be mandatory parenting classes starting in high school, and you should have to have a license to be able to be a parent to explain that you don’t give alcohol to kids.
For me, Twitter works best as a way of taking pictures of being stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. If people really want to read really funny quips about life, parenting, and pop culture, then by all means read Michael Ian Black’s tweets.
I’ve become sort of an accidental advocate for attachment parenting, which is a style of parenting that… basically, the way mammals parent and the way people have parented for pretty much all of human history except the last 200 years or so.
Slow parents understand that childrearing should not be a cross between a competitive sport and product-development. It is not a project; it’s a journey. Slow parenting is about giving kids lots of love and attention with no conditions attached.
How my parents are in the kitchen is a good indicator of their parenting style. Mum cooks for sustenance, wants to get in and out, the job done quickly. My Dad wants to prance around in the kitchen, create a curry – and a mess – and entertain everyone.
Kids are soft these days, period, end of the story in every respect. People coddle them too much. I’m sick of that; it’s irresponsible parenting. Taking care of them is one thing, but turning little boys into little girls because you’re coddling them so much, kids need to have experiences on their own.
Whatever needed to be done, I need to know how to do it just as well as my wife. You know, for us to be able to really balance the parenting. It was very humbling, and it was also, um – terrifying. Because, you know, giving a baby a bath for the first time is one of the scariest things you can do on this whole earth.
I don’t think my father considered allowing a teenager to follow his dreams was necessarily good parenting, or even parenting. I think he thought I was a teenager with teenage impulses. I’m pretty sure he knew that if he just let me follow those impulses, it would wind up being very expensive and perhaps even life-endangering.
I’m torn about late parenting. I believe people should spend their twenties living and having fun and not having any regrets later. I also think people in their thirties generally make better parents but so many of my friends are having trouble – myself included – as fathers get older.
In truth, I am a single mother. But I don’t feel alone at all in parenting my daughter. Krishna has a whole other side of her family who loves her, too. And so Krishna is parented by me, but also by her grandmother and aunts and cousins and uncles and friends.
We’re living in a time when parenting is not at all mirroring the way I was parented. For me, I just followed my parents around on their errands; when they were busy on the phone, I was quiet. It’s a different kettle of fish these days: They run the house, and you listen to their music, and you go to their appointments.
The number of stressors has multiplied exponentially: traffic, money, success, work/life balance, the economy, the environment, parenting, family conflict, relationships, disease. As the nature of human life has become far more complicated, our ancient stress response hasn’t been able to keep up.
My grandmother was a kind of Scarsdale, New York, society woman, best known in her day as the author of the 1959 book ‘Growing Your Own Way: An Informal Guide for Teen-Agers’ – this despite being a person whose parenting style made Joan Crawford’s wire hangers look like pool noodles.
Ah, the power of two. There’s nothing quite like it. Especially when it comes to paying utility bills, parenting, cooking elaborate meals, purchasing a grown-up bed, jumping rope and lifting heavy machinery. The world favours pairs. Who wants to waste the wood building an ark for singletons?
Happiness is not always through success. Equally, the constant pursuit of success is sure unhappiness. But we have to find the balance. My own thoughts are that parenting is very personal. And we all feel enormous insecurity about parenting. What are they going to think of us 20 years down the line?
