Raising Kids Rulebook

I’m sure there are a zillion books out there about this stuff, but the truth is I don’t really read that much, books anyway. I could definately use some guidance though. I’ve got 2 1/2 year old twins. It’s so amazing to watch them grow up. I love it. But I think about the million decisions my wife and I will make over the next 18 years as we raise these little guys. In particular I can’t help thinking about how every little decision shapes and molds their long term fate. Little things around discipline, love, acceptance, trust, kindness, anger and all those other things that come up every other second when raising kids. I’ve had enough therapy to know that there must have been a series of little things that added up to the ins-and-outs of my personality, in a good way and a bad way too. There doesn’t seem any way to predict how these things will impact them later in life. I wonder how our decisions will affect their ability to communicate with people. How will they give love and recieve it. How will they listen and be heard. Will they have the same difficulties I’ve had communicating feelings? Who knows. In my mind I think there should be this massive database out there that you can plug in all your parenting behaviors and it runs some sophisticated algorithm and spits out a picture of what your kid is going to be like in 20 years. But it’s just not that way.

It seems the only way we can gauge is based on our past experiences. I think that’s one reason why we see such generational swings. When kids are treated to the extreme one way, too little love, too much love, not enough attention, too much attention, they tend to swing to the opposite side when they raise thier kids. My own parents said that to me growing up… “my mother and father never once said I love you”… so they compensate by saying it 10000 per day, literally. So how does that affect my relationship to love? Am I somewhat desensitized to it? Does love become this thing I take for granted because it was “over-given”. Sounds crazy, but to some extent I think it’s true.

So as I think about my own kids. I’m trying to stay balanced. I think to myself, what would my parents have done and how did that affect me in the long run? I don’t really know what else to do. Like most things in life though, I’m pretty sure whatever I think I think is going to be the outcome, it’s going to be something I totally didn’t even think of. So maybe I shouldn’t really think about it and just do what seems best in that moment and do my best. In particular I wonder about our discipline methods. I think this is a key area because it can have so many positive and negative results. I think my parents were probably a bit too wishy-washy. They were strict in terms of what was right and wrong; on the one hand they had ridiculous rules that just didn’t make sense and didn’t have the desired results – for example, I wasn’t getting great grades so they thought I should just be forced to stay in my room on weekdays because that would drive me to do homework. Of course, that didn’t, I just resented the fact that I couldn’t see friends during the week and I also didn’t get an opportunity to fine tune my interpersonal skills as much as other kids. On the flip side, they kinda gave me everything I wanted so I ended up with distorted sense of entitlement without tying the behaviors together.

It seems to me that discipline for young kids is the first test for parents and kids and that really starts shaping the emotional structure of our kids. I feel like I need to be firm with them. They need to understand what’s right and wrong and that there are consequences for doing things that are not acceptable, even if those rules don’t make sense to them. My wife and I are pretty heavy on the time-out mechanism; we put them in the powder room or closet alone for a few minutes, then we have a firm conversation with them after they’ve calmed down about why they were put in there and make sure they understand before we let them out. It works and they seem to get it. Yeah, they’re very angry and loud and crying and banging on the door going in, but after they seem to look us in the eyes having learned something and being grateful. Who knows though, maybe I’ve added to an increasingly toughening scar tissue that will hurt them in the long run. On the flip side, giving in and not being firm could have an equally destructive result. I’ve seen way to many kids that just don’t care about what anyone thinks and just do whatever they want, far past their childhood. They just didn’t have any rules growing up, that doesn’t seem to serve them well. I’m sure anyone in the business of parenting or teaching parents will say it’s a balance. So I’m just trying to stay aware, be balanced, talk to my wife about what she thinks and do the best I can. I just know from experience that it really sucks to have a broken behavioral framework that you have to work hard to re-architect throughout your life. But maybe that’s life by design. We seem to be designed to fix, so maybe we need to breakdown first and go the process to really appreciate it. Who knows.