Parenting, attunement, and guilt
On yesterday's post, I was asked my opinion about the guilt we moms can feel when we do things other than care for our children. (At least that was how I interpreted the comment, my apologies if I got it wrong.) I think this is something that is important to think about.
I'm sure nearly all of us have come across helpful little bit of information along the lines of, "There are only 940 weeks from the time a child is born until they turn 18. Make the most of them!" Or, "They're only little once." One of my favorites is the poem:
The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
For children grow up, as I've learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down cobwebs. Dust go to sleep.
I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.
(This is actually the last stanza to a longer poem entitled, "Song for a Fifth Child" by Ruth Hulbert Hamilton. The entire thing is quite charming.)
There is a lot of wisdom to these little bits of advice. Childhood is relatively short (well, except when the baby has screamed for hours and it's 2 a.m., or when the three year old absolutely refuses to put on his shoes, then it seems like eternity would be shorter.) We should pay attention to our children and enjoy them. These are all good things. If I were to look through past posts, I'm sure I could come up with more than a few I've written on the same topic.
The trouble is, we tend to be an all or nothing people. If we espouse one thing, then there is no room for anything else. For mothers, this becomes a little troublesome and guilt producing. Yes, babies need a lot of attention and are only small for a short time. Does this mean holding and caring for the baby is the only thing a mother can and should do? Heavens no! A mother can still be loving and attentive, and do non-baby related things. (And this is from someone who really loves to hold babies.) Too much interaction and not enough rest and sleep makes for a cranky baby, too. A mother who never does anything but care for her child can feel as though she has lost herself, as though she has ceased to exist as anything but someone who cares for others.
Babies do take a lot of time and work. It's just how life is. But as I've mentioned several times already, babies grow, and as a child grows, the need for constant care diminishes. In fact, part of growing is the slow tipping of the balance between the parent providing for the child to the grown child providing for him or herself. The process of growing up is really the process of learning to be an adult. In order for this process to happen, the parent does need to start letting go.
Instead of seeing childhood as solely a time of life that the parent is responsible for making as idyllic and magical as possible, we would do better to see it as a preparation for life. (Believing that we are responsible for creating as magical a childhood as possible is a direct path to a severe case of mom guilt combined with such pressure to perform that I guarantee you won't enjoy a minute of the supposedly magical childhood you are creating.) Sure playing and wonder and protection and love and security should be a part of every child's growing up, it doesn't mean that it is the parent's sole responsibility to spend every waking moment catering to this ideal. Learning competence, independence, self-knowledge, self-control, and empathy are just as important as the carefree wonder part.
It's not bad for a child to see a parent engaged in things the adult enjoys. It is not bad to see (and then learn to participate in) the work which goes into running a house. It is not bad to have to wait for things. It is not bad to be bored, and have the experience of learning to entertain oneself. It is not bad to understand that ones whims are not the center of the universe.
The key here is attunement. Attunement describes how in line one person is with another person's needs and moods. A mother who is attuned to her baby knows her baby's moods and cries. She can tell the cry that means hunger from the cry which means tired. Attunement doesn't end with infancy, though. A parent who is attuned to their child knows if the child needs the parent to drop everything right now to provide comforting, or if this is something that the child can work out on their own, given space and time. An attuned parent can sense if the child is feeling neglected or if the child is secure in their relationship. Without enough time and understanding, though, this attunement can be lost.
And maybe that is what is at issue here. Has our society somehow lost the idea of the importance of attunement? Do we spend so much time apart that parents and children no longer have a deep and abiding sense of each other? Or do we have such an agenda about what we perceive childhood should be that we have lost the ability to discern what our child actually needs? Without this sense of the emotional mood of ones child, it would be very difficult to know whether it is okay to go ahead and get some vacuuming done because you are afraid of man-eating dust bunnies, or if your child really needs you to sit down and share a story together, and ignore the dust bunnies one more day.
There have been times when I feel as though I have lost my sense of attunement to my children. They are inevitably when a life change needing my near constant focus has taken over my life. My children still get fed and clothed, but sometimes that's about all that happens. New babies, difficult pregnancies, deaths, adoptions, and moves are all things that have caused me to feel disconnected. I can remember with each of these things, after some distance from the event, feeling as though I had woken up suddenly, and there are all my feral children who need more than a mom somewhat blindly stumbling through life. It takes a while and it takes some effort to strengthen those relationships again so we are all understanding each other.
Yes, enjoy your children! Spend time with them. Do nice things for them. But feel free to do other things as well. Clean your house (unless you just really don't care... that's your decision), read a book, go for a walk. Find things that you enjoy and do them. Spend time with your friends. This is important, too. In fact, it is a great lesson for you child in how to be an adult.
I'm sure nearly all of us have come across helpful little bit of information along the lines of, "There are only 940 weeks from the time a child is born until they turn 18. Make the most of them!" Or, "They're only little once." One of my favorites is the poem:
The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
For children grow up, as I've learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down cobwebs. Dust go to sleep.
I'm rocking my baby and babies don't keep.
(This is actually the last stanza to a longer poem entitled, "Song for a Fifth Child" by Ruth Hulbert Hamilton. The entire thing is quite charming.)
There is a lot of wisdom to these little bits of advice. Childhood is relatively short (well, except when the baby has screamed for hours and it's 2 a.m., or when the three year old absolutely refuses to put on his shoes, then it seems like eternity would be shorter.) We should pay attention to our children and enjoy them. These are all good things. If I were to look through past posts, I'm sure I could come up with more than a few I've written on the same topic.
The trouble is, we tend to be an all or nothing people. If we espouse one thing, then there is no room for anything else. For mothers, this becomes a little troublesome and guilt producing. Yes, babies need a lot of attention and are only small for a short time. Does this mean holding and caring for the baby is the only thing a mother can and should do? Heavens no! A mother can still be loving and attentive, and do non-baby related things. (And this is from someone who really loves to hold babies.) Too much interaction and not enough rest and sleep makes for a cranky baby, too. A mother who never does anything but care for her child can feel as though she has lost herself, as though she has ceased to exist as anything but someone who cares for others.
Babies do take a lot of time and work. It's just how life is. But as I've mentioned several times already, babies grow, and as a child grows, the need for constant care diminishes. In fact, part of growing is the slow tipping of the balance between the parent providing for the child to the grown child providing for him or herself. The process of growing up is really the process of learning to be an adult. In order for this process to happen, the parent does need to start letting go.
Instead of seeing childhood as solely a time of life that the parent is responsible for making as idyllic and magical as possible, we would do better to see it as a preparation for life. (Believing that we are responsible for creating as magical a childhood as possible is a direct path to a severe case of mom guilt combined with such pressure to perform that I guarantee you won't enjoy a minute of the supposedly magical childhood you are creating.) Sure playing and wonder and protection and love and security should be a part of every child's growing up, it doesn't mean that it is the parent's sole responsibility to spend every waking moment catering to this ideal. Learning competence, independence, self-knowledge, self-control, and empathy are just as important as the carefree wonder part.
It's not bad for a child to see a parent engaged in things the adult enjoys. It is not bad to see (and then learn to participate in) the work which goes into running a house. It is not bad to have to wait for things. It is not bad to be bored, and have the experience of learning to entertain oneself. It is not bad to understand that ones whims are not the center of the universe.
The key here is attunement. Attunement describes how in line one person is with another person's needs and moods. A mother who is attuned to her baby knows her baby's moods and cries. She can tell the cry that means hunger from the cry which means tired. Attunement doesn't end with infancy, though. A parent who is attuned to their child knows if the child needs the parent to drop everything right now to provide comforting, or if this is something that the child can work out on their own, given space and time. An attuned parent can sense if the child is feeling neglected or if the child is secure in their relationship. Without enough time and understanding, though, this attunement can be lost.
And maybe that is what is at issue here. Has our society somehow lost the idea of the importance of attunement? Do we spend so much time apart that parents and children no longer have a deep and abiding sense of each other? Or do we have such an agenda about what we perceive childhood should be that we have lost the ability to discern what our child actually needs? Without this sense of the emotional mood of ones child, it would be very difficult to know whether it is okay to go ahead and get some vacuuming done because you are afraid of man-eating dust bunnies, or if your child really needs you to sit down and share a story together, and ignore the dust bunnies one more day.
There have been times when I feel as though I have lost my sense of attunement to my children. They are inevitably when a life change needing my near constant focus has taken over my life. My children still get fed and clothed, but sometimes that's about all that happens. New babies, difficult pregnancies, deaths, adoptions, and moves are all things that have caused me to feel disconnected. I can remember with each of these things, after some distance from the event, feeling as though I had woken up suddenly, and there are all my feral children who need more than a mom somewhat blindly stumbling through life. It takes a while and it takes some effort to strengthen those relationships again so we are all understanding each other.
Yes, enjoy your children! Spend time with them. Do nice things for them. But feel free to do other things as well. Clean your house (unless you just really don't care... that's your decision), read a book, go for a walk. Find things that you enjoy and do them. Spend time with your friends. This is important, too. In fact, it is a great lesson for you child in how to be an adult.
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