Findings

My favorite parenting book so far is Boundaries with Kids. It’s given me terms for understanding my children’s behavior, and taught me the importance of disciplining them as someone who’s on their side, who’s firm but not angry, and who is helping them to recognize and respect the defining boundaries that will surround them all through life.

The basic principle is to state what the consequence will be if a certain boundary isn’t respected, then let the consequence occur. My problem is that I’m not very creative with consequences! I thought I’d share a few of mine here, and ask my readers for some input. What works for you?

Here are mine.

1. For hurting your sister: one warning, then if it happens again, I forbid them to play together for a certain period of time. They immediately start thinking of how much they love to play together, and what they lose when they don’t respect each other. It also communicates their value to me; they are worth protecting from harm.
2. For failing to complete a job (clean your room, clear the table, feed the dog, etc.) within a certain time limit: a toy gets put away for a period of time.
3. For failing to manage a scatterworthy toy (legos, lincoln logs, crayons, beads…): toy is put up for 24 hours. Sometimes they lose the privilege of playing freely with it, and can only do so under supervision.
4. For defiance: extra chores, though I have a hard time thinking of ones suited to ages 7 or 4. Any suggestions? (They often resist doing their chores, but they LOVE anything to do with sweeping, spraying and wiping, or washing with soap and water.) I can think of: weeding, straightening books in bookcases, folding towels…?
5. I use time-outs for various offenses. 
6. For failing to do chores: a portion of their allowance is withheld.

Those are my best ones. What works for you? I find it easier to think of punishments than real consequences that will communicate and teach a value: what do you lose when you don’t share? What problems are you creating for yourself when you don’t take care of your stuff? I’m looking for practical ways to help my children ask these kinds of questions as a result of decisions they make, rather than simply assert my control over them. So if you have some ideas, please leave me a comment!

• Saddle blanket: piece of discarded felt that’s been hoarded
• Green belt: piece of discarded elastic
• Blue belt: deflated balloon
• White thingie on back: saved piece of a broken clay creation
• On head: flower petal tied on with discarded yarn
• On ears: mouthpiece of a popped balloon

Now you see why I’ve started washing and saving recyclable materials for this daughter to re-use — milk jugs, egg cartons, veggie trays, etc. Some day, this child is going to be a great inventor! For now, I’ll be happy if I can get her to clean her room (sigh…).

Kent Desormeaux really wanted his son Jacob, 9, to see him ride across the finish line to a Triple Crown victory. Besides needing cochlear implants to hear, there’s a good chance Jacob is headed for blindness by the time he’s 21. “He’s lost his hearing, but his memory is profound,” Kent Desormeaux said. “I’m hopeful that if he’s having a bad day, he’ll just think about that day that Dad won the Triple Crown, and hopefully, that will make him smile.”

Instead, Jacob saw his father meet adversity with grace and maturity. Perhaps that’s a better sight for this child to hold forever in memory — even better than a victory lap.

Revisiting the stories of childhood with my children has been stirring. It recalls old dreams to mind, old feelings of security, old ways of imagining and knowing.

What would have happened if I’d been able to take horseback riding lessons when I was young? Would I have developed an eating disorder in high school if I’d been pursuing an interest actively, one that involved caring for another living thing? Would I have travelled the long academic, intellectual road I ended up on? Or would I have taken a different route, one where the abstract life of the mind is bound up with the full-bodied creaturely life? What if the passion for all things horseworthy had been a lifestyle rather than an imaginative escape? 

I remember that for my seventh birthday, I got a horseback ride at a nearby campground. My brother was much more of a natural than I was. I remember looking at our shadows as the horses trotted up a hill. His showed a human body that was one with the horse. Mine showed a small shadow bouncing up and down on the horse’s back, perilously close to sailing off entirely.

The dreams stayed firmly in place and sent roots far down. I went on reading horse books. I envied two of my friends who took riding lessons, something we couldn’t afford. The closest I came myself was riding in circles in the back yard on a horse named Scooter who belonged to a neighbor. One day he got sick of it, and ran off over the hill to go home — with me still on his back. I remember that feeling of taking off into the unknown, realizing that I could do whatever gymnastics I wanted with the reins without changing the basic scenario: Scooter was driving, and I was along for the ride. Finally the owner, a good-natured high school student, caught up with us on foot, shaking her finger at the horse and saying, “Scooter, you die!”
 
Here’s Scooter, a 9-year-old writer2b on his back, with my brother steadying him:

It was a joy to give my daughter horseback riding lessons in the fall of last year. Doesn’t she look tiny? 

But in writing this, I realize by now the sense of regret that hangs with me. I know I need to guard against trying to live my own lost dreams through her. I know I need to be careful not to ignore her other interests when we go to the library or make decisions about extra-curricular activities to invest in. I know she’s not me.

But it’s still true that though she’s her own person, she shares these dreams of my younger self. There’s something a little sad, but also a little healing, and a lot fun, to reread all these books together. I think they’re even a bit of a protective wall against forcing my unlived life on her; these stories represent other people’s visions, filters that strain out and redistribute any of my personal “stuff.” And each time I close a book, it reinforces that I chose a different path from these horse-people in the stories.

All of this to say that revisiting old books with my daughter means revisiting old dreams. We sit side-by-side on the couch, she with her self-in-formation, everything new, everything exciting; I sit there with a self largely formed, returning to something no longer new.

And yet it is new. The dreams as they’re encased in stories aren’t; the stories and their formulas have been around for a long time. But there next to me is a new thing, a little girl with a heart full of dreams, her own person, yet also a reminder of my own past self. How will her story turn out?

My daughter is the artist of both pictures in this post.

When I was a graduate teaching assistant, I had to be observed by a senior faculty member each semester. One of my first observers left me with a lasting piece of advice. “You have lots of great stuff to give them – great ideas and information,” he said gently, “but you need to let them do more of the work. That might mean you have to settle for less good ideas. But they will learn more.”

I’ve reflected on that often, and I find myself mulling it once again as I conclude my first year of homeschooling. I suffer from a very strong case of “Do it myself” that continually lurks in the wings and threatens to short-circuit learning on the part of my young students the minute my guard is down. It’s not that I step in and do the math worksheets, or give the answers to spelling questions, or do the handwriting exercises. It’s more of an impatience that surfaces in other ways: picking up messes I didn’t make, straightening a bed sloppily made, feeding the dog rather than calling the child to do it, giving verbal correction without the supporting backbone of discipline.

All of this falls under the heading of directing character development. I’m not sure why it is, but the things I care most about, I’m very ambivalent about taking a purposeful approach with. (It’s the same with teaching my daughter to play the piano. I really don’t want to blow any potential love for music… so I don’t push her at all. We’ve had maybe 3 lessons in a year.) When it comes to character, I’m not always sure how to shape and educate my children. They both have wonderful minds and a natural sweetness and generosity, but they can also be self-centered. They can be prideful about what they know, or can do well. They like to help out when it’s their idea, but not so much when asked by someone else. 

In short, they’re human beings. 

So how do I address these “heart issues” without labeling them or nagging them or guaranteeing years of therapy for OMI (Overbearing Mother Issues) later in life? How do I “let them do the work” and be shaped by it? What follows is a loose, baggy monster of a post consolidating some of my answers to that question… and I’m hoping for more good suggestions and feedback! (Edited to add: It’s a given that modelling is the most powerful teaching. These are attempts to think through the ways I might make a more conscious effort in addition to that.)

House Rules:

I keep a simple framework of five house rules, and refer to them often so that we envision our life together in these terms:

1. In our house we share and that’s that. (Leave it in your room if you don’t want to share it.)
2. Keep your hands to yourself.
3. Respect each other. (We have lots of discussions about what this means in different contexts.)
4. Have good manners at the table. [I've found it necessary to spell these out separately... :-)]
5. Do your chores. (Chores are spelled out separately.)

Biblical Training:

As a Christian, another way to let them do the work is to acquaint them with the biblical source of my view of people, arming them to think about it. It’s hard to imagine a greater respect for human life than is modelled in this story of an infinite God becoming one of his creatures. Not only that, but he becomes a servant, washing the feet of his disciples. Respect, humility, and helpfulness are all primary here. So are the fruits of the Spirit listed in the Bible: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. 

However, the Christian life was never intended to be lived from the outside in; it’s not a system of ethics and rules that you can implement on your own. I’ve heard other mothers complain that their children aren’t kind enough to each other, a problem they address with lectures. But kindness, and the other fruits, are by-products of a genuine and growing relationship with God. This means I need to be very careful not to give my children the impression that it works the other way around by setting up the rewards and punishments according to their successful performance of a set of “religious” rules. That would be the worst thing I could do for them, and would set them up not just for a self-righteous mode of living, but a lifetime of doubt and uncertainty about what they themselves believe. Faith, if it’s real, is activated through choice; it isn’t superimposed from without. It’s theirs, not mine.

To me this means that my biblical instruction has to confine itself to the limited goal of informing them, and then leaving them free to recognize their own fallenness, free to feel sorrow or need without defensiveness, free to choose. I need to keep the context of rule-bound behavior as simple and spacious as possible. For me that means sticking to the 5 house rules.

Good Books:

I can “let them do the work” better if I have a clear vision of what “the work” is. I’m not very good at reading self-help books, but they can really clarify the issues. My ever-so-brief bibliography of parenting books needs expansion, so this is basically a call for suggestions. So far my favorite ones are:

• Boundaries With Kids, a very practical treatise on taking the long view of a child’s character. (Here’s a link to my review of this book.) 
• The Well-Trained Mind, a book outlining a classical method of homeschooling but one that includes lots of helpful and realistic information about children’s development. It’s more a book for my educator persona than my motherly one, but these days they can be hard to separate.
• Shepherding a Child’s Heart. It’s been awhile since I read this book, but it’s one I have mixed feelings about. I appreciated its focus on the heart rather than just its outward manifestation in behavior, as well as its exposition of the ways we can go off-track disciplining our kids and end up aiming for control instead. But I disliked the discussion of spanking. It seemed complicated, impractical, and in some ways worrisome (parents reiterating that they get their authority from God every time they administer punishment, for instance).

Lavish Praise:

Last but not least, if I want my kids to repeat their best impulses till they become a habit, I need to offer lavish praise when they rise to the occasion. Letting them do the work means valuing their efforts as they are. “Let me see those hands!” exclaims my mother-in-law whenever one of my daughters helps. “Those are helping hands!!” I’ve been struck lately by how easy it is to miss such opportunities due to:

• Perfectionism, with its grudging, snobby attitude toward elevating effort over result. Their character isn’t being formed as much in their grasp of math concepts, or their sense of the sweep of human history, or their love for reading, as in their eager use of those helping hands. It really doesn’t matter as much that the bed be wrinkle-free as that they make it without being asked and without complaining.
• Impatience; often the best moments are small and easy to miss. Last night I was vacuuming. I was in a hurry to get it done while supper was in the oven, but just as I was about to switch on the cleaner, my 4-year-old said authoritatively, “Mommy, I have something to say to you.” I looked up, and I’m sure “what now” and “hurry up” were written all over my face. “Mommy, I’m thankful you clean this place up,” she said, spreading her arms to encompass the whole house. Wow. I almost missed that little explosion of encouragement from a sweet heart. More importantly, I almost missed my chance to reinforce it with a hug and a smile.
• Forgetting their uniqueness. A friend reminded me recently that our greatest giftedness often lies in those areas that frustrate others while we’re growing up. I joke with my daughter about Templeton in Charlotte’s Web when I look under bed that provides safe haven for so many things that should be thrown away… But she who leaves an endless trail of drawings, of saddles and bridles made out of everything from pipe cleaners to playdough to yarn to discarded (and hoarded) toilet paper tubes, is surely destined to be a creator of something big!  I catch myself so often shushing my other daughter, who speaks with such boldness and animation and effervescence to strangers, and who simply cannot be awake and be silent, but she is surely destined to be a great communicator, a great channel between people. I need to let them be.

I’m thankful for the good advice of a faculty observer years ago whose insight reaches far beyond the bounds of a freshman comp class, and into the very different world of my household incubator of minds and hearts. As I look back over this post, I see that “letting them” is one part of the equation — letting them be themselves, letting them fail, letting them know what’s expected of them — and ”do the work” is the other part — household chores, trial and error in relating, thinking and searching for truth. Maybe the better image of them is not containers to be “instilled” with character, but tumbling rivers that flow between the guiding banks of their parents on the way to a much larger and more complex sea of human life.

This morning I ventured into the attic, nagged by the sense that I’d seen copies of some of the books of my youth semi-recently. Lo and behold, there was a box of treasures! For starters, here are the horse books:

1. Helen Kay’s A Pony for the Winter
2. Rutherford Montgomery’s El Blanco — The Legend of the White Stallion
3. Stephen Holt’s The Phantom Roan
4. Dorothy Brenner Francis’ The Flint Hills Foal
5. Sam Savitt’s Vicki and the Black Horse
6. Glen Rounds’ The Blind Colt
7. Lynn Hall’s Wild Mustang
8. Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion and The Black Stallion Returns
9. Doris Gates’ Little Vic
10. Margaret Goff Clark’s Mystery Horse
11. Anita Feagles’ Casey: The Utterly Impossible Horse

(Gee, I wonder where my daughter’s horse-passion comes from…)

And besides these, there were a few others like Little Women, Encyclopedia Brown, Pippi Longstocking, a few Beverly Cleary books, children’s biographies of Helen Keller and Louisa May Alcott, etc.

Most or all of these would be available at the library, of course. But there’s something about finding my own old copies that’s hard to describe. These are chunks of myself. How can inanimate objects be so significant?

I also wonder how much my own attachment to these books is influencing my daughters. A lot, I’m sure. But that’s not something I’m going to get analytical about. I love that when I plopped the box down at the foot of the attic stairs, they were on it in a heartbeat, raking through the books on the floor, exclaiming, carrying them off to pore over on their own.

I have Mother’s Day, and mothering in general, on my mind this week. I’ve been very aware lately of how many things pollute the nobler aspects of my maternal instinct:

• personal selfishness
• desire for control
• loss of the long view
• fear of what others may be thinking
• overprotectiveness

My ideal of motherhood involves some of these things, but in healthier proportions than they often show up in my own life. Of course I want to protect my children, for instance, but that’s not the impulse that should be directing all decisions, or I’ll create very fragile little people. I should be conscious of others’ impressions, because I’m training my children to live in a world of people. I want them to be able to function there with courtesy, confidence, compassion. (All the c’s, by the way, are a coincidence.) But I don’t want them to let fear of what others think shape who they become. So my ignoble impulses as a mother aren’t usually an issue of kind, but of degree.

There are two poems that capture the essence of mothering to me with economy and beauty. One is Wendell Berry’s “To My Mother:”

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.

So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong…

The rest of the poem is here, and develops, to me, an idealized picture of how any mother would love to be seen by her children. It details the kind of maternal selflessness that I want to practice, but feel like it’ll never happen. Then again, I’m surprised again and again by how little it takes to delight children. One brief wrestling match with Daddy. One half hour of undivided attention from Mommy doing whatever the child chooses. Those moments, not the ones I carefully plan and orchestrate, or that seem to cost me, are the ones they talk about with starry eyes.

Berry’s remembrance of his mother is a real contrast to this poem by Fleur Adcock, called “For a Five-Year-Old,” written from a mother’s perspective. It confronts honestly the awareness of personal imperfection and inconsistency, a sobering burden when we think of how our children look up to us:

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another… 

The rest of this one is here. I wonder if Wendell Berry’s mother had these moments. I suspect she did. I hope I’m not guilty of pulling the noble and good things of the world down to my level when I say that I think part of motherhood is the continual awareness of imperfection, sometimes failure, faced with resolve to stay in the game. That resolve is what I hope my children will remember about me.

Just as they hope I’ll remember that they’re people in formation, learning to live within their personalities and bodies and environments. They need the same freedom to fail I desperately need myself.

I’ve struggled with guilt feelings that I read too much, because when I’m reading I’m not as accessible to my children. Turns out I’m not the only one. Another mother also tried to balance her passion for reading with her mothering, and her daughter ended up a writer to be reckoned with: Eudora Welty. Here’s one of Welty’s memories of her mother from One Writer’s Beginnings:

Now, I think of her as reading so much of the time while doing something else. In my mind’s eye The Origin of Species is lying on the shelf in the pantry under a light dusting of flour — my mother was a bread maker; she’d pick it up, sit by the kitchen window and find her place, with one eye on the oven. I remember her picking up The Man in Lower Ten while my hair got dry enough to unroll from a load of kid curlers trying to make me like my idol, Mary Pickford. A generation later, when my brother Walter was away in the Navy and his two little girls often spent the day in our house, I remember Mother reading the new issue of Time magazine while taking the part of the Wolf in a game of “Little Red Riding Hood” with the children. She’d just look up at the right time, long enough to answer — in character — “The better to eat you with, my dear,” and go back to her place in the war news.

Welty doesn’t detail her own feelings about this, but I know one thing: when I read this description, I feel an instinctive liking for her mother! Looks like I need to get better at multi-tasking…

The story of my life as a mother is the peeling back of layer after layer of selfishness. The birth of my children released a new kind of love in me: fiercer, more helpless, more inescapable than any I’d experienced before. But its effect has been to shine a bright light on the paltry, flimsy supporting muscle-tone in my character.

First it was the piano. When my first daughter was not quite 1, my grandmother passed along to me the lovely Mason & Hamlin baby grand that had been cherished by my grandfather. It brought me a rebirth as a musician. Someone had given me an old, 1970’s vintage Fender Rhodes years earlier — the kind that has all 88 keys and weighs a ton, but works for an apartment-dweller. It kept my musical persona breathing. But the acquisition of a piano with dynamic range and with all the responsiveness and body of the acoustic instrument at its finest was a continual temptation. I remember that often, while my daughter was in her playpen, I’d take a basket of laundry down to put in the washer, and the piano would whisper, “Just run through that song one time.” An hour later I’d dash guiltily back upstairs to find her asleep.

Then it was the worship team at church. I’m a classically trained pianist, but as part of a large, contemporary worship ministry I developed improvisational skill, and I was totally infatuated with the wonder of being able to play the same set of chords in a zillion different ways. I played more at home, and more and more frequently at church, maxing out at three services every other Sunday, preceded by a Thursday night practice. There was a seductiveness to belonging to that artistic community, and I rose to leadership. More time went into it. More heart went into it.

Then the experience went sour, and with it, the piano. We left that church, having lost confidence in it as a spiritual community distinct from some other kind of big corporation. The pull of the worship team, and of the piano, evaporated. We’ve searched for, and (dare I say it?) found another church home. But I’m not feeling drawn to music there. Why? Partly scar tissue, but also: I’ve discovered blogging. Blogging is all me, all the time. My life looks orderly here. Now this computer, and this small patch of cyberspace, has a gravitational pull equivalent to a black hole in my universe. Now as a result of blogging I’ve experienced a reading renaissance, which is great – but when my nose is in a book I’m not accessible. Now when I bring a load of laundry downstairs, it’s the computer, not the piano, that sucks me into a place where I don’t notice time passing. (I seem to have a thing for keyboards…) 

Is it any wonder that lately I’ve found myself questioning my convictions about homeschooling? I’m not doing a very good job, I reason; the academics are going fine, but my heart’s not really in it; they know more about young children’s development at the school around the corner; this isn’t my calling.

This is a personal question that each family answers differently, but in my case, the foregoing line of reasoning is me rationalizing my selfishness and fear. I think there are a couple of false lines of thought embedded in it. One is, “I have a need for creative expression.” That’s partly true. I’m a right-brainer, artsy-type, dyed-in-the-wool, down-to-the-bone expressionist. But does it follow that I need to be spending these hours here, at this particular kind of expression, serving (let’s be honest) no real purpose beyond myself? My deepest “need,” right now — speaking for myself and no one else — is to fulfill my role as a mother wholeheartedly. I know this, because I know how many nights I lie awake tweaking my mothering, praying for my children, battling my way toward understanding them. What will it be like in 10 years if I don’t give them my best during my waking hours now, while they’re here and young?

Somewhere in there, too, is the lie that I can’t. I’m not sure if this is true for all mothers, but many times during the day I’m intensely aware of my deficiency of inner resources — of wisdom, of gentleness, of words that go to the spot of heart that needs them, of long-term perspective, of simple physical energy. I’m certain that for me, this computer is a place to hide, a personal “napping room” where I check out of engagement. The reason this is a particularly ironic problem is that one of the main reasons I’m homeschooling is to offer myself to my kids, to not hide from them, to be present to them in all my glorious imperfection and absurdity. That’s love, isn’t it? That’s why I’m doing this.

When we first started homeschooling, it was an idea my husband liked but wasn’t pushy about. I made the decision to go for it myself. But now, he frequently and confidently says that it’s my calling in life. Is it? After a year of it, have my grand ideals held up?

Not sure. Not sure it’s my calling in life. But I am sure it’s what I should be doing now.

I don’t remember Shrek, but I know the movie contains a statement about people being like onions, many-layered. My layers are all pitifully self-involved. But somewhere in there is something non-onion that feels the sorrow, weeps at the peeling, and envisions something better than my selfishness can supply. It’s the part of me that appeared out of nowhere when my children were born. It’s the part of me that’s hoping resolving to bring my blogging back into its rightful place, and my children into theirs, starting today.

Seven years ago today, I went into labor at the deli counter in the Price Chopper. It was the one day ever that they didn’t offer to help me out to the car with my groceries (she remembers, vindictively)… which was okay, since this little lady didn’t arrive till suppertime the next day.

Her birthday is also the day my mother persona was born. Up till then, I worried that said persona might not make an appearance; I’d sat through all the childbirth videos in Lamaze class thinking, “What greedy little monsters they are! Look at the agony they put their mothers through… and then they want to nurse right afterwards!!”

Then mine was born. The doctor held up the wet, huddled, terrified creature in the palm of his hand and said, “Say hello.” This totally new self ripped out from somewhere in my heart and vowed, “I promise I’ll take care of you! I promise it will be all right!!” That was that. No turning back.

I went looking for a poem, and the very first one I found was Anne Stevenson’s “Poem for a Daughter”:

‘I think I’m going to have it,’
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
‘Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.’
A judgment years proved true.
Certainly I’ve never had you

as you still have me…

The rest is here. Poetry Friday is at The Simple and the Ordinary today.