The real job of Moms

Aira    Featured Post     daughter, feelings, Happiness, Love, mother job, parenting, Parents, real job of mother, son, teenagers

It’s not cooking dinner, changing diapers or helping a preschooler glue colored macaroni on a coffee can as a Father’s Day gift.

The most important assignment a mom has is to nurture her children.

But what does that mean, exactly? Most of us have a vague notion about what being nurtured feels like, but here are a few specifics.

A nurturing mom goes beyond being the “maintenance person” in a child’s life. She doesn’t just keep a child clean, fed, warm, and dry. She also helps enable her children to develop fully by pouring life into them. She models joy and passion. Nurturing is filling your child up with aliveness.

A nurturing mom takes time to play, read, and take pictures when the toddler’s spaghetti ends up on the head instead of in the mouth. She enters the child’s world to see things from his or her perspective, even if it means the carpets don’t get vacuumed for a while. She provides empathetic understanding from a position of strength and support. That’s true whether she’s dealing with a toddler or a teen — except for the part about spaghetti on the head.

Like dads, though, moms have a natural urge to protect their children. That can lead them to cross the line between nurturing and futile attempts at control.

You can’t control the results, but you can stir in the right ingredients. You can seek to know your children as individuals, different as they might be, and bring out the best in each. You can demonstrate by example how to explore life with zest and express the unique gifts God provides each of us. Your nurturing can blossom in emotional and spiritual growth.

Before you feel burdened with a mile-long list you can never follow through on, let me be quick to say that nurturing is not about “doing it all” or doing it perfectly. It’s about doing the best you can — without losing yourself or driving yourself crazy because your own needs aren’t taken care of. You won’t be able to nurture your children if you’re exhausted from burning the candle at both ends.

So please take care of yourself, too. You need aliveness in order to pass it on to your teenagers.

The real job of Dads

Aira    Featured Post     Dad, daughter, Father, feelings, parenting, real job of Dad, son

Do you know what is the real job of Dads? A dad’s primary, underlying job isn’t control. It’s to validate every one of his children. It means to let your child know over and over and over, through words and actions, that this is true,  “Hey, you exist and you matter to me.”,  “You’re good enough.”, “You’re an okay kid.”

It’s the idea that children get their earliest, most lasting impressions of who they are from what’s reflected back to them by their parents. These impressions become those “records” in the jukebox of your child’s brain.

Validation doesn’t mean lying. It doesn’t mean telling me, “Great game, son!” when I really played poorly.  Just as validation has nothing to do with control, it has no relation to being a “softie” as a parent. You can be firm and strong and still validate your child. It means acknowledging your son or daughter, certifying his or her existence, affirming the person apart from the not-so-good performance.

Some fathers go to the opposite extreme, withholding validation when kids don’t “measure up.” Our culture is so conditional in its validation — affirming only those who’ve won fame or fortune, or been born (or surgically assisted) with “good” looks — that the same approach often creeps into our parenting. It’s easy for a man to validate a good performance; it takes a lot more time and energy to see and value the human being in the absence of any performance and put it into words.

A dad’s biggest job is to relinquish that kind of control and affirm that the existence of each of his children, with or without any great (or poor) performance, is acceptable. If you’re a father, recognize that each of your children is worthy of being alive. You may know that, but each of your children needs to hear it from you.

Value that child as a person, even when disciplining an action or attitude. Make sure your child knows he or she is good enough for you. Otherwise, when that tree falls in the forest, the silence will be deafening.  The best time to begin validating is the day you bring your baby home from the hospital. Parenting a teenager begins when he or she is born.

When he or she is born. Really.  But it’s never too late to start. Do it often enough to cut a record in your teen’s jukebox that says, “I’m okay. I’m good enough.” If you can do that, trying to compensate with control won’t be such a temptation.