What Are Your Parenting Mantras?
There is so much emphasis on long play in parenting. We can raise children, but in reality we are raising adults – people who, in a surprisingly short period of time, will live on their own, living their own lives. And how we raise them as children will at least partially affect the type of adults they grow up to be and the relationship we have with them. We know this, but we can still get bogged down in everyday tantrums, bad attitude and disobedience. The days are long and the years are short and all.
In particular, during the pandemic, I actually noticed that if I have to complete a task, be it work, something I need to do around the house, or something related to volunteering, it tends to distract my whole direct attention. Sometimes that means I don’t want to be distracted by a story my 10-year-old wants to tell me about a video game he just played. And then one of the best parenting advice I’ve ever heard occurs to me, and I force myself to look away from the computer screen, or the recipe I’m trying to follow, or the toilet I’m making: listen to the little things to he once told you important things. Because to him, little things are big things right now.
Does it matter, in this one moment, I’m too busy to listen? Probably no. But if I’m playing a long game, I want to develop a relationship with him in which he knows that his interests and feelings are important to me. So I listen to little things so that one day he will tell me the important things. It became a mantra for me.
Recently I came across another one that wrote on a sticker and pasted it to a computer monitor: “There is a need behind every feeling . “ This is a reminder that if my son seems moody or irritable, I need to stop and wonder why. I need to be interested in what happens under the surface of an emotion or behavior. ( The same thing happens when I feel moody or irritable.)
And then there is my new favorite, whom I came across in the comments on this post on Reddit about a five-year-old girl who accidentally broke a blender and was afraid of getting into trouble: the ax forgets, but the tree remembers . This seems to be a Zimbabwean proverb, and it refers to the fact that injured people will take much longer with them than the person who inflicted the wound, which is a good thing to remember the next time you start yelling at someone. who you love.
I wondered what little wisdoms other parents were repeating to themselves and sticking on bathroom mirrors and refrigerators as daily reminders that they should be more conscious about raising their children. If you’d like to play, share your favorite parenting mantras with us in the comments.