“What you can do as a parent is “strive to be like them.” The easiest way to do so is to consciously look back to your own childhood. Remember what it was like to be small, culturally disrespected and invisible, and everything that accompanied that, both the good and the bad. In this way you will find in your heart the understanding and empathy that can manifest the respect your child deserves. When you “think like a kid” you minimize the natural and cultural differences between generations to build the strongest, most sound foundation of a healthy relationship as a parent and child.” Want to Be a Better Parent? Think Like a Kid/Be a Better Parent by Thinking Like Kid by Linda Dobson of Parent at the Helm
The first time I felt someone truly understood how difficult my childhood had truly been was when reading a book on alcohol and substance addiction when earning my MA in Psychology.
The most powerful and profound aspect of the text was the author’s clear and precise description of how incredibly difficult it is being a child and matriculating through this time in life towards adulthood.
The essays she delivered offered a humbling tribute to what it takes to endure and survive this phase of life and to all of us who did and have survived childhood.
We do not usually perceive childhood as a phase of time of life one has to endure.
Yet in truth that is what many of us have done.
The difficulties and challenges we faced came from either parent(s) by whom we felt miserable misunderstood and/or peers with and around whom we felt incredibly awkward, as if an outcast.
To struggle with both challenges as many of us did offers not only a wealth of pain, but a trial by fire of the soul.
We exit scorched and oftentimes shamed, but in some cases, and strangely so, the better for it.
The trials and challenges I faced during childhood tore at me like rabid wolves. To this day, over three decades after exiting high school, various life encounters can stimulate triggers that exhume feelings of insecurity and abandon, enough self-doubt to swell and ocean, anger and most particularly hurt to the point of my heart feeling as if it is shattering as it first did during childhood.
The key and operative words here are as if.
They speak to the lynch pin and blessing, if one can call it such, of having endured and survived difficulties during childhood.
The as if factor when related to present day experiences serves to keep a modicum of those painful experiences, if not the macrocosm of the gestalt of pain and struggle that overshadowed our childhood, thus providing us with a wealth of internal reference to which we can defer and that we can pull when striving to operate as that better parent–a mother or father who is more aware and emotionally present to the internal needs of our child than we felt and experienced in relationship to our parents.
Regarding mothers and daughters, it is imperative that mothers remain open, and responsive to our daughters’ needs, both emotional and cognitive, as they seek to maneuver through the various phases of childhood.
Unlike sons, daughters, that they can bear and possess the capacity to deliver children, need to hold an abiding sense of what it means to vulnerable without feeling unsafe and in danger of being devoured by the visible and invisible forces of life that prey upon all who have, presently do and will ever live.
The ability to swim, while remaining present and aware of one’s fears of drowning makes us aware of a constant and perpetual truth known to all, but acknowledged by few.
Life is perpetual change. And to this end we are forever working to keep loss and hurt at bay. Thus we suffer, because of loss and more importantly due to the ubiquitous and omnipresent threat of loss.
No one experiences this threat of loss on a more visceral level than a parent. While continually living with the possibility and inevitability of our own death(s), we live in continual awareness of the possibility of losing our child/children before our own demise.
That women and mothers are the ones who carry children and birth them into earthly existence, this fear fuel by the very nature of quality of life itself pulsates through us not unlike blood coursing through our veins.
To swim with awareness of our fear of being overwhelmed and drowning, while still making those strokes to stay afloat is requires not simply skill at maneuvering life. It also asks that we develop an artistry of perceiving and evaluating life experiences, discerning them each as they approach us with every daily human encounter.
We’re acquire the building blocks for accomplishing this during childhood.
Moment to moment.
Chop wood. Carry water.
Walking forward as a child. Dealing with the class bullies, those mean girls, teachers who seem to have it out for us, parents who just don’t seem to get it nor us and all that we going through.
Trying to grow up.
Striving to become an adult.
One of the most precious things we can give our children is the understanding that not only we were children, but we also remember what it was like to be a child.
And that while on the surface the worlds of child and adulthood appear far apart, the two dimensions and phases of life exist and vibrate in closer proximity than most adults want to and do admit.
Confessing our frightened we are each moment that we draw breath offers a monumental truth to our children that when given and we join them in embracing binds us to them not simply as parent and child, mother and daughter, but two persons, you and me, who are trying to maneuver life.
And though we be frightened, by clinging to each other that fear is lessened.
“Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall find comfort.” Matthew 5:3-10
That comfort come from clinging to each other and telling your child she or he is not alone then realizing as you look into her or his eyes that neither are you. For they are with you, your daughter and/or son as you are with them.
As mothers we experience not simply the healing presence of our daughters when we embrace them. We also hold the crucible in and through which future generations will enter life on this planet.
Hug your daughter.
You are not alone.