Parenting through the crucial years. Review on Tips on Parenting

Death of a near one can make you wonder if there is a meaning to life. Death of a parent means that the umbrella protecting you earlier no longer exists because the umbrella is only half. The structure to protect you from the pressures of the world is gone. Consulting your parents and still going ahead with your own choices means that you get your own choice regardless and the support too in case it was a bad idea. The beauty here is that when you consult your parents, you know very well, that you need not necessarily follow them and yet consult them to see if their advice holds water. If it does, it helps. Even if not, it helps – refine your options and alter the choices you make.

I begin to see that there is no purpose of anything in life when it concerns me. When I correlate my life, it is usually how I fit in to others requirements which gives me a sense of purpose. The decisions made earlier too were keeping in mind the feedback received, however, I never thought of it that way. If I want anything now, it is a deep inner desire to rollback time and relive those experiences. Unfortunately, there is no time machine to this and the memories sometimes help.

I used to wonder how my dear departed one’s life must have been and often imagined myself in those shoes. Filling up those shoes is a huge responsibility. Do memories get transferred to progeny on birth? I am not sure, but more questions arise. I have spent countless months now, brooding with the pigeons at Sankey Lake.

So when I keep myself busy, I try to ensure that the umbrella is fully functional for my children. I realize that as the umbrella being myself now, I must be a working umbrella if I need to protect my children for the longest time out of the warranty period. Unfortunately, there is no warranty to life and the only solace you find is in moments you spend with your near ones. I try to take more special care to ensure that there is a smile on their face especially on Monday mornings when that dreaded first trip to school takes place. Taking special interest in fulfilling their desires and expectations sometimes makes you superhuman to them.

Your life changes at each stage. At the end of each day, an action you have taken may change your thinking. You may even end up taking an opposing stand of what you took earlier. Now that there is no one to consult, I actually feel that sense of freedom of taking those decisions on my own. The decision I make is my choice and in that sense I have the freedom whether right or wrong. Still you do not want to muddle it up and seek at best a more cautious approach then earlier – without realizing that this is exactly what your parents choose to do for you prior to their departure. And then you realize the depth of your loss.  So again, the question goes back to – What is the purpose of my life? Is it to fulfill others requirements or is the quest still ongoing? I take up pastimes, but unlike earlier, it still is for a shorter duration of time.

And then there is the memory of your own experiences. How do you add the sum value of your experiences to them? Allow them to make those mistakes themselves knowing fully well the end result, I guess that works. Making your own mistakes is one way of unprotecting children. And yet, the only help you can give them is to make those mistakes remotely supervised.

It’s quite easy to dish out advice. However, if you have noticed at a certain stage of your life, you are no longer that receptive to advice. You begin to see a hidden agenda in everything people say. Now imagine when you dish out advice to your kids, how receptive are they to it? They may or may not follow it in your presence, in your absence, no way as they experience their first trysts with ‘freedom from parent’s tyranny’.  Instead allow it to happen in the confines of your home or in privacy and then deal with the repercussions if any.

Resentful employees are the people who will not quit and keep fighting it at office for everything thriving in those situations when they succeed in not getting the work done and justifying it with a lame rule quoted from the rulebook why it should not be done.(They take their personal problems seriously and distribute it at office). But just as the organization nurtures him and tries to include him in all discussions, so should a parent with the child. Eventually an organization will throw the employee out if the behavior impacts the business. But with children, your commitment as a parent extends beyond that to 100%.  Parents should also help the child come out of the resentfulness by keeping those communication lines open non stop.

When you show your vulnerable side to your kids, they may never ask you for help in that regard. It may be ok for the kids to charter into unknown territory on their own. But again, I am not sure if that should be the case. Kids understand that you are already vulnerable and may not trouble you. But it is important for them to communicate too and expose their vulnerabilities. Otherwise, on the extreme side, a game like blue whale may cause death even.

I have begun to write at a friend’s suggestion on my birthday. which I read today. I take it that a few updates are warranted without impinging on personal space or freedom. Not necessarily that I have to write. I just thought I’d pen the state of my mind currently for this friend. It does help to capture the thought process at each stage of my life.