Parenting bag of tricks

When I look at my blog stats, it shows me which posts have been viewed. Usually it's the most recent ones by a week or so, but every so often some older ones get thrown in the mix. There are some posts that show up a lot for one reason or another, but there is a whole lot that don't. That's not surprising when I have over 4000 posts published here. Once in a while I'll see an old post listed and click on it to see what it was. I truly do not remember a lot of what I have written and I'm curious. Often it is just a nice walk down memory lane of what we were doing ten to fifteen years ago. Other times it is not so nice. This isn't because the memory is bad; I do tend to remember very clearly the hard stuff I have written about. It is not so nice because I am brought up short with my old self. 

I will say I consider my Old Self to be the writer of posts any time previous to March 2012. That's very specific, isn't it? That is because it was in March of 2012 that I was brought face to face with the fact that my way of parenting was clearly not working and that I needed to change. I've now spent the last ten plus years chronicling that change. It was not an easy process and it required me to take a long, hard look at how I viewed my children, the world, and frankly, myself. I am so glad I made (am making?) that journey, but boy am I glad I don't have to go back and do it again. Parts of it were brutal.

The post that made me think about this all over again was about running a boot camp for my children's perceived difficult behavior. I saw the title and forced myself to read it even though I knew it would be unpleasant. I wasn't wrong. I squirmed my way through the entire thing and felt both ashamed that I had written it and amazed that this was how I truly felt in that moment. I even pondered deleting the whole thing and just making it disappear lest it guide some other unsuspecting parent down a road they didn't really want or need to go. But I didn't. I left it there in all of its awful glory, a testament to exactly how right I was convinced I was. Instead, I put a rather lengthy disclaimer at the top of it because I also think it is important to save it as a part of my journey. 

And I was so totally and utterly convinced that I was a good parent. That I did all the right things. That my children were well behaved (and that good behavior was completely and totally due to my extraordinary parenting). I called myself a benign dictator because I ran the show and doing what I said when I said it was important for my children's moral, personal, and educational growth. I knew that if other parents would just follow my (extensive) checklist, their children were be just as fantastic as mine. I wish I were exaggerating. 

Pride goeth before a fall and all that. We had been heading for that fall for quite some time and it was only sheer grit and will-power that we continued on as well as we did. It was unsustainable. But if you've read here for any length of time, you are well aware of the paradigm change that happened over the course of those post-2012 years. 

What I really want to briefly revisit is that the reason we were able to hold it together for as long as we did was because while I did fall into the consequence, benign dictator trap, at the root of my parenting was always connection. And it was that connection that held us together. 

I sometimes talk now about having a pretty significantly large bag of parenting tricks... twelve children and nearly thirty years of parenting will do that. You've seen a lot, you've tried a lot, you have a sense of what works and what doesn't. I think I may change my language when talking about these parenting experiences and skills, though, because there aren't really any tricks. 

Tricks gives the impression that there are things parents can do that can change their children's behavior. Sure, some of them may change them in the short term, but if behavior is communication, then using a trick to stop the behavior is not actually solving anything. More often than not, the behavior will come back worse than before until what the child is trying to communicate is actually addressed. It is not that the children need to be fixed, it's that they desperately need whatever is wrong in their world to change. That's not a trick. It's also not quick or easy to do sometimes. The only thing in my parenting bag these days is safety and connection. Any tricks I have usually involve helping me, the parent, reframe situations so that I can more easily identify the need of my child and to figure out why my own behavior is getting in the way of addressing that need. That's it. No tricks. 

I sometimes joke that I used to be a good parent. The parent who focused on the externals doing all the things that those around me viewed as important. I don't much care what people think of my parenting these days. I do care how my children feel. Do they feel loved, supported, listened to, accepted, safe? If they do, great! If they don't, then we'll all keep working on this thing called connection. It's not always easy, it's not always fast, it is always worth it.