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Dear Parents: Your Approach to Parenting Might Just Suck
Your mindset, words and actions become your kids’ reality; choose them wisely
There’s the terrible twos, terrible threes on up to the terrible teens, 20s, 30s and beyond. It never ends….
The above quote was uttered by my late, great mom more than 30 years ago. To my perception that pretty much sums up her attitude on parenting. I can’t help but wonder if many others don’t also share with her that very same attitude toward raising kids, given all the ‘wounded souls ’ who are wandering around out there nowadays.
In all fairness, this attitude wasn’t formed in a vacuum; she was raised by parents who were bathed in the scripture whatever strict religious dogma in which they were raised. As such it is with this teaching, everything in life — parenthood being one of them, I’m sure — was a chore, a duty, something to endure because it was “God’s work and we must do it (like it, or not).”
In my grandparents’ generation, the babies pretty much came when they did; families of ten or more children were not uncommon. So, their kids showed up on the scene and it was their parents’ solemn duty to raise them (a lot of the time, for help on the farm) to adulthood. At 18 it was “out the door!” at which time many usually got married at this time, because that was life then.
