Parenting from Depth, Part I

 

Part of Love Over 60 is recognizing that you've raised children and you might know something about it. I was recently asked to do a piece for a small online magazine on the topic, The Troy Estefan Magazine. Should be out in the next 30 days. Here it is...and more will follow:
A lot of parents, especially new parents, would like a nice, tidy “how to” guide to get them through some of the more difficult challenges with kids. Being a parent and grandparent, I am sympathetic to this yearning, especially in light of how we all seem to be moving more at speed than at depth in our culture. But let me tell you why hunting for the best guide to parenting is not such a good idea. Parenting is a personal, creative undertaking every single day. It requires that we achieve and sustain emotional openness and attunement to our children. It requires that we be fully present. It requires we take control of the speed in our lives and wrestle it down so we can have more depth because the best parenting springs from depth, not speed.

What do I mean by speed and depth? By speed I mean the rate at which our attention shifts plus the amount of information we absorb in a given amount of time. The current popular commercial showing people in a state of information overload is satire, but not that far off. When we’re processing so many attention shifts and so much information uptake, facilitated by smart phones, laptops, tablets and desk tops, our energy gets into a kind of obsessive agitated wave-length—imagine a jagged, compressed stock chart. By depth I mean the experience of being in the moment, being patient with, curious about and attuned to your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual state and those of others, in this case, your children—imagine a nice gentle wave with the highs and lows within reasonable proximity to each other. By depth I mean connection to your deepest humanity.

To get to depth, we have to regularly have the discipline to shut down the technology for periods of time. We have to consciously control the technology and not be controlled by it. I have a client who was attending his daughter’s softball games but texting and handling email on his phone rather than watching her. After a heart to heart in a leadership retreat with me, he stopped doing that. Do you think his daughter didn’t notice? She certainly did, because he was fully present to her performance now and their after-game discussions were lively and full of specific observations and appreciations. He was tuned in to her.

While all humans come into the world with the same brain in terms of structure, each child is unique. Your child is your child, not your neighbor’s, not your parents’ and not Dr. Phil’s or Dr. Laura’s. This child is living with you with your strengths and weaknesses, living in your home with your furniture, your tastes, your daily habits, living in your village, town or city, with your ethnic or racial background, at your particular moment in your life journey, your heritage, your parents, grandparents and ancestral endowments and wounds.

Great parenting doesn’t happen from consulting an app on your phone or how a “how to” book when our baby is crying. It happens when we turn all of our gifts of attunement to our child’s world. How? By regularly learning to take a couple of deep breaths, check in with what feelings are going on inside us—confusion, fear, anger, sadness, determination, etc—and then making a conscious decision to put those to the side and pay one hundred percent attention to our child with an open heart and mind. We feel our child’s needs…which we are wired by nature to be able to do, after all!

In our best moments, we humans are brilliant feelers. Our feelings are informed by thought and our thoughts informed by feeling. So when I say “feel” I’m talking about functioning on the highest level, not being awash in emotion. If you allow yourself to really attune to and intuit your child’s needs, there is no stopping how great your parenting experience will be. Parenting is not an intellectual exercise. It demands you be engaged with your full personhood.

When my son, Ben, was a toddler, I heard a lot about how and when to toilet train him. Nobody had to tell me toilet training was important. I was the guy changing his diapers every day and I also was the guy who could feel that helping him learn to poop on the potty without in any way being shamed was the number one imperative. So what did we do? We left the door to the bathroom open when we peed and pooped. How basic is that? We let him see what we were doing, knowing full well that kids want to do what they see their parents do. We got him a little potty and put it next to the commode. One day, right at age two, he went in, sat down and pooped. We didn’t coach him to it. We didn’t really train him at all. We never decided there was a certain age by which he would have to do this. We also didn’t egg him on with exhortations like, “C’mon and give mommy and daddy a pretty present!” By keeping the bathroom door open, we kept the classroom open. He learned through observation and imitation. Of course, we took note of his accomplishment and congratulated him, but we didn’t throw a party or write his congressman. It was a good thing he’d done. It wasn’t a great thing. Over-reacting to what pleases and displeases us just raises a kid who will do the same. Isn’t that common sense?

Some parents have major anxiety over when and how to explain “the birds and the bees” to a kid. Again, if you relax into it and attune, you come to the conclusion that it’s a good idea for a little kid to see his mom and dad naked in a natural way on a regular basis. No, I’m not going to suggest you let him see you having sex. That’s ridiculous. A small child can’t understand it and would likely be frightened by it. We should always observe reasonable boundaries. Sex is between two grownups. End of discussion. So, no demonstration and no Power Point presentation. But if you’re comfortable with your bodies and comfortable with your child’s, then at some point it’s natural enough to say, “You came from Mommy’s body. You were a seed in there that Daddy helped plant by putting his penis inside Mommy. And then you grew until one day, it was just time for you to come out, you were getting so big!” There are picture books for little kids to facilitate this stuff. (Where Did I Come From by Mayle and Sanders is one example). Save your anxiety for something else. Little kids are not sexual. They’re just curious. That curiosity should be met with information expressed in a way that they can understand at their given stage of development. Being clear about what makes sense at a given age is the essence of attunement and you get there by slowing down, by controlling the pace of your life, by living at depth. And, sure, it is helpful to learn about the four major stages of development kids go through (Your Child’s Growing Mind by Healy as one suggestion). Information is always good if you fold it into your capacity for tuning in.

Another area a lot of parents seem to be confused about is when to nudge a mature child from the nest. Actually, an attuned parent is doing this from very early in the child’s life by simply encouraging her to do the things she is quite capable of doing at any given moment. When a three year-old is actively exploring the world, we take her to places that are safe to explore. We let her go a certain distance from us, maintain a line of sight. Most little kids come running back to share things with us. They want to show and tell us about their adventures. Humans are story telling creatures. It’s what we do. It’s how our brains are wired. We have memory, language, emotion and ideas. We weave them together into a life story. Allowing our children to have age-appropriate adventures without overly controlling them or giving them too much freedom is critical to their developing their sense of competency in the world and their identity.

When my son, Ben, was about three and a-half, we were spending a lot of time on some of the rustic beaches in our area of California. We explored sand dunes and tide pools and learned all about the plants and critters that lived there. One evening, we came upon a fresh water pool of water at the base of a sand dune no more than a hundred feet from the ocean. There were pollywogs in it. I was quite surprised to find pollywogs so close to the ocean. I told Ben these were very special pollywogs, very brave and probably the children of frogs who could sail the seas. He was quite taken with the idea. He picked up a stick and sort of herded the little black creatures around in the pool. I just let him do that for quite a while. Then dusk was coming on so I told him we had to go. We walked about 150 yards to the spot where we would climb up the dunes to our car.

Suddenly, Ben said, “I want to go back and see those pollywogs one last time.”

Well, it was getting late and dark and I personally was tired. So after a little discussion with him, I said, “Ben, I’m going to wait here. You can go back and see them one last time if you hurry, okay?”

He looked at me for a few seconds and then said, “But I’m scared to go alone.”

I mirrored his feeling: “You’re scared?” (It’s almost always a god idea to mirror back children’s emotional state rather than immediately jump to a solution or try to talk them out of what they feel. When you mirror first, they are more likely to experience a connection between your getting them and the solution you do come up with.)

He said, “Yeah.”

I thought it made sense for him to be scared. He was three and a-half. We were on a beach. It was getting dark. I was suggesting he walk some distance from the safety of my side to have the experience he was after. I looked around. There was a very large rock about three feet high nearby. I jumped up on it and said, “I’m going to stand here on this rock so you can make me out against the sky, even though it’s getting dark. I think you can do this on your own if you can see me.”

He liked this idea. He looked up at me and said, “I see you, Bob.” (He always called me Bob. Why? That’s another story for another day).

I said, “That’s good, Ben. Now go see those pollywogs.”

He set off walking as fast as he could, turned several times to wave at me as he went further and further. Eventually, I saw him go over a rock on the other side of which was the pollywog puddle. After a few minutes, I thought I saw him come back over and start walking towards me, but dusk was falling fast now. I held my position and called out to him. I heard his small voice respond, “I’m coming!” After a few more minutes, he walked out of the dusk. I immediately noticed how relaxed his body was. He was swinging his arms happily. He walked right to the rock, looked up at me and said, “You can come down now, Bob.”

I jumped down. “So how are the pollywogs?”

“Fine,” he said with a big smile.

“And you did that all by yourself. Was it scary?”

“No, Bob. It wasn’t scary because I could see you.”

“Well, Ben, I will always try to find a rock to stand on, so you can make me out against the sky.”

We hugged and headed up the dunes.

That’s the best story of parenting from depth I can give you.* As dusk was falling, I was tired but still present. Ben wanted to see those magical pollywogs one more time. We worked it out so he wasn’t afraid and so I didn’t have to make the walk. It’s in moments like these all through our childrearing years that we gradually show and teach our children how growing up is a natural thing; one step leads to the next until, one day they’re going much further than a hundred and fifty yards and exploring the wide world, not just a puddle filled with pollywogs.

Now I realize not everyone is fortunate enough to live on California’s Central Coast as I do. But I have clients who live in big cities who manage to take maximum advantage of the park system to gradually introduce their kids to life in the wider world as they find it. Let’s not get hung up on the physical environment. This is really about being connected to your kid. Surely, not all parenting flows as naturally as this did. But many of the challenges change from mountains to mole hills when you slow down, relax, and get to depth. That’s where you’ll find clarity and the creative joy of parenting at its best.

*This is a shortened version of this incident. The full version is in my book Real Fatherhood: The Path of Lyrical Parenting, by Bob Kamm, 2002, available through bookstores everywhere.

C 2011 Bob Kamm