Friday, March 11, 2011

Mindful Parenting Relationships

It's not easy for parents to accept shortcomings in their children. Most of us want them to be almost perfect.

We believe their successes make it easier for us to feel good about ourselves. This allows us to beat our chests and rave about our children over and over to anyone willing to listen.

Meanwhile,  there are some of us who are parents of children that are not only not close to being perfect, but are downright disappointments.

We constantly wonder what happened to them. Why did they turn out this way? Who's responsible? Us?

Sometimes it's difficult to accept that we are the parents of not-so-perfect children. We expect them to have successful lives, not fall prey to deleterious behavior and succumb to the perils of failure.

Unfortunately, they sometimes don't quite measure up to our expectations. And when they don't measure up, we blame both them and ourselves.

Some of us find it very difficult to accept personal responsibility for their failures. Whenever we reminisce abut them as small children, we always recall the high expectations we had for them.

Oh, we wanted so badly for them to be successful. And we were willing to work three jobs, if necessary, to provide them with the resources to grow up as successful adults.

So most of us don't quite know how to understand how we messed up. We surely didn't plan for our children to disappoint us.

Even though most of us have not had any formal or informal training on becoming successful parents, we tried to do the best we could. At least, this is what we tell ourselves over and over again.

We, like our parents before us, learned about parenting on the go. And whether we like it or not, we received most of our parenting training from our parents, books, movies, and so forth.

Our parents taught us about morality, spirituality, education, work, responsibilities, and so on. These were basically the same beliefs they had acquired from their parents.

Similarly, it was from our parents or guardians that we began to develop likes and dislikes about the way they treated us.

Sometimes they were angry with us. They spanked or whipped (beat) us for things we didn't quite understand at the time.

While on other occasions, they took us to the movies, on vacation, to the park, sports' events, to get burgers, and so on.

After we become adults, we begin to judge our parents. Frequently, we complain about how badly we were treated or we felt unloved by them.

We blame them, in many instances, for our problems and for not achieving the things we wanted, but were unwilling to work hard for. And we promise ourselves we will raise our children differently.

So parenting is something we don't really know very much about prior to becoming parents.

Nevertheless, it is something most of us believe we are capable of doing, and doing it better than our parents.

Perhaps we think this way because as adults our parents don't seem to have the same power over us as they did when were kids.

This probably causes us to believe we are equal to or greater than because we know more about the latest trends in parenting. 

It seems that some of us continue to mimic our parents parenting techniques even as we oppose them.

We continue to hold dearly to the beliefs that the paradigm family is one with two parents, children, and a happy household.

We rarely, if ever, envision ourselves being a single parent, with children in an unhappy household.  In other words, we don't consciously prepare for variations in the paradigm.

Similarly, as we get closer to becoming parents, we begin to imagine ourselves in a happy relationship with our spouse and children.

It's the perfect relationship that have us coming home from work to a nice, spacious, well designed home and finding our spouse and children greeting us with hugs and kisses.

We further imagine sitting at the dinner table with the family eating a sumptuous meal and the family recapitulating the day's events.

For many of us, the dream is nothing like the reality itself. Parenting is much more complex than just imagining happiness.

We don't plan for those moments where we experience disharmony, arguments, abuse, isolation, anger, oppression, uncertainty, and overall disappointment in ourselves as parents.

And as much as we hate to admit it, this is the time when we realize we just don't know as much about parenting as we thought we did.

We forgot about how our parents might have felt while coping with our dysfunctional behavior, rebellion, disrespect, and failing grades.

When we reach the point in our parenting of having to acknowledge that we need to learn more about ourselves, we can no longer rely on the reference points of the past. We need to find a new perspective to go to that's ideal for us. 

Meanwhile, some of us who reach these moments where we must seek clarity by embracing a new perspective, we begin to become mindful of our actions and what's causing them.

This is the moment we begin to use mindfulness to guide us in our decision-making.

This is the moment we become open to our own imperfections and to those of our children.

This is the moment we gain insights on the meaning of individualism, both in terms of goals and actions.

This is the moment we understand the relationship between parents and children.

This is the moment we understand the divisions of power and responsibility.

This is the moment when we recognize that as parents we not only are responsible for imparting our beliefs and values to our children, but for teaching them how to accept personal responsibility for the information.

Children have very limited power in the parenting relationships. They are taught beliefs and values by us that make very little sense to them.

They, like we did as children, perceive the world as a place they know very little about. And like us, they accept what we teach them until they are exposed to different information.

Somewhere within the parenting conundrum is the mindfulness we need to guide us beyond our parenting sufferings, the expectations, the unwillingness to let go, the clinging to power, and the attachments to our children's successes or failures.

To become mindful means we become fully present in all our parenting decisions.

It means our willingness to accept and understand that our children have power, individuality, goals, and desires, too.

It means we are responsible for guiding them on how to use this power to become successful children.

And it means we must release our attachments to the results.

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