Aspirations Become Abuses

...viewed through the lens of the past. And how quickly it changes...

My husband and I have been parents now for about 10 years. We are a few years past the intense early years which featured intense sleep deprivation, constant fear that we were doing everything wrong all the time, hyperfocusing on individual decisions like co-sleeping vs. kids sleeping in their own room, times one zillion because there are a zillion things just like that when you are a new parent.

To cope, we had conversations about all that stuff with all our new parent friends, read the internet voraciously, talked to our elders, and our pediatricians and still we were very insecure. Tough times.

I even had an in-home daycare business, so I was able to talk to the parents about their choices and study their parenting styles and create working theories about how those things worked for their individual children's needs. Still it was a constant barrage of choices and decisions, each of which had their merits, none of which would yield any feedback for several years.

In this time I learned a great deal about how rapidly parenting standards and norms change. Most people reading this blog will have fond memories of their own childhoods and remember fondly things like playing outside with their friends for hours on end, with no adults in sight. Or maybe, making a batch of cookies, and licking the spoon and bowl with the leftover batter. Maybe having their mom bring homemade cupcakes for the whole class for parties. Maybe riding in the payload section of a pickup truck, or sticking your head out the window while driving on the highway?

Each and every one of those things would earn any current day parent a side-eye at best. Possibly some well-intended question or discussion from nearby parents? At worst, you might find yourself the subject of a CPS investigation like the mom who recently got in trouble for allowing her children to be outside in her fenced in backyard for 10 minutes while she looked on in the kitchen.

What is considered normal, ordinary parenting for one generation, quickly turns into meeting a legal definition of child-neglect and abuse for another. In the 5 year span between the birth of my two children, I have noticed an even greater emphasis on academic preparedness, and the managing of every minute of a child's experience has become the defacto expectation of good mothering. This is despite mountains of evidence demonstrating that it's good for a developing child to experience boredom and allow their imaginations to develop. Evidence be damned, the anxiety that accompanies modern day parenting interferes with people's ability to trust their judgement. The competition that takes place among some groups of mothers pushes people into greater areas of absurdity, regardless of the impact it actually has on children.

The only reason I mention any of this at all, is to say, many things we now consider to be abusive or neglectful behaviors by our own parents, may have been common and ordinary practices for their time. For example, just as my family members were not convinced that smoking was absolutely hazardous to their health, I don't think they had words or concepts to describe emotional abuse. They lived by the saying, "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me." I am pretty sure they thought if they were not beating me or harming me physically, whatever else they did was not abuse. Also, from their perspective, providing food and shelter was hitting it out of the park and everything else was just bonus. They would have said proudly they were very good parents.

This does not mean the many negative outcomes borne by me, my mother and my uncles just occurred randomly with no relation to their parenting decisions. It does not mean the serious issues we all have, and the fallout from those times is meaningless or insignificant. No. Each of us has suffered immensely from the things that have happened and we each have a big job to work through it.

For me, it takes a tiny bit of the power and impact away to consider my mom and grandparents were just a product of their own family culture, along with the standards of the day. It's a demonstration of the phrase "if you knew better, you would do better..."

I am also humbled, knowing at some point in the future, things I do now to be a good parent may someday come under the same sort of scrutiny when my children have children of their own.