The Purpose of the Blog and My Own Childhood Story
I’m a parent educator. I’m the director of a Montessori preschool. I have a Masters degree in elementary education. Do I know a heck of a lot about parenting? You bet! Do I know ALL the answers? Nope!
Now, I don’t say that to undercut myself, but I have always had a difficult relationship with the word, “expert.” To me, it gives off an air of a know-it-all, and I believe in growth mindset. I delight in learning and I gobble up information whenever I can. I also realistically don’t have ALL the answers.
But that’s where you and I working to problem solve together comes in handy. I do have a lot of experience and education in raising children, and I want to be someone who has a solid foundation to support you and feel as though you aren’t alone in this journey. Because you aren’t.
The purpose of this blog is to share my personal journey in parenting , including the wins and losses, because I’m human, too. As a parenting coach or parenting educator, I am wise, but also flawed and still learning. I will also be utilizing this blog to write reflections about articles, opinions, or situations I may have encountered that I’d like to share.
To start with my personal side…
I will start with my own childhood, because I believe our parenting styles are shaped by the way we were parented—whether we admired it, experienced trauma and want to avoid repeating it, or fall somewhere in the grey (as most of us do).
I just turned 40 and am an elder millennial. I grew up in an age where I still wrote bibliographies and used encyclopedias to write reports in school, but by high school was utilizing the internet to feed my research. I didn’t have a cell phone until late into high school, so my friends and I would go the dunes in Michigan for a day trip with no tether attached to our parents. There was a certain freedom that looking back we didn’t even realize we had.
Even with that freedom though, I was raised by helicopter parents. To be fair, they both grew up on the south side of Chicago across the street from one another in the Bridgeport neighborhood. They witnessed violence relatively often, and when they had me and my sister, they knew they wanted to move to the suburbs.
Off we went to Downers Grove when I was 5 years old, right before I started kindergarten. I remember seeing our backyard for the first time and saying that we had a park in our backyard. My parents decision to move us to the suburbs was one of many that indicated that they wanted better for us than what they had. They also were both working full-time but each made it their mission to spend time with us, something their parents never did with them.
My dad would come home from a long, physically tiring day of work, change his clothes, and immediately come outside to play baseball, hide and seek, or soccer with us in the backyard. My mom took the train into the city every day, but would take at least one day off a year to chaperone a field trip for each my sister and I. She was also the fall product sale mom for our Girl Scout troops. She wasn’t the playmate like my dad was, but she was always steady, organized, and dependable.
What I didn’t receive though, was the emotional support that I needed. Again, to be fair, it was a different time. Mental health was just emerging thanks to the likes of Princess Diana, but at the time anxiety was a little known word. I absolutely had and have anxiety and struggled all of my life until just a few years ago when I was finally diagnosed and started getting support for it.
Still, the common phrases I heard were:
“You’re too sensitive.”
“You’re too emotional.”
“You’re too much.”
I’d get laughed at for being compassionate towards others or crying. For Christmas one year, my parents even gifted me a Dairy Queen t-shirt that just said, “DQ” on it, and they explained that, for me, it stood for, “Drama Queen.”
I don’t think I was abnormal for expressing emotions, but in the time I grew up, it seemed we weren’t allowed to have emotions. And that was the status quo. So my thought was that I was inherently wrong or bad for experiencing these various emotions. I thought I needed to change and become different to fit into others’ boxes and to make others more comfortable.
I also have a mother who is particularly opinionated and critical. So I was often criticized on my appearance and told that all first impressions are based on how you look. I was always bright in school and my sister struggled with academics. But my sister was taller, thinner, prettier, and in my family it was clear that beauty was valued over intelligence. I felt less than.
In contrast, I learned that I did get praised when I performed well, so like Pavlov’s dogs, I did all that I could to achieve academically since it was clear that I wasn’t winning anyone’s hearts, including those of my parents, based on my appearance.
I don’t share this to bash my parents, but to simply share my perspective and truth. I think they had the best of intentions when raising us, but the tools and resources at the time were limited compared to what is available to us now. Parenting has evolved. Just like how car seats from the 1980s would never pass today’s safety standards, our understanding of child development and emotional needs has also progressed.
Walking into Adulthood…
In my twenties, I recognized a few lessons:
My parents never allowed me to fail and I was now unprepared to handle failure on my own.
The bumpy road of life was paved for me. My parents, like many others, wanted us to be happy. To them, that meant making everything easier for me. If I forgot my homework, it would be run to school so I didn’t get a zero. If I got homesick at camp, I was picked up and taken home.
Also, because I was bright, a lot when it came to academics came easily to me. I played it safe and life was pretty easy.
However, when I graduated college in the beginning of a recession, life was no longer easy. I struggled to even get a job out of college and was working at a children’s museum part-time with a Master’s degree. Umm…excuse me? My pride took a hit, and the sting of rejection was new and raw.
I didn’t need to dim my light. My emotions and how I express those are a part of who I am.
I learned about friendships with women in my twenties, and one of those revalations was that we are stronger together. That being a feminist isn’t just about our status compared to men and whether we’re equal or not, it also has to do with how we treat other women.
Along with this newfound value of female friendships, came an understanding of authenticity, my highest regarded value. I admired women who were unapologetically themselves. To be honest, they even scared me at first. I was so accustomed to trying to smush myself into this tiny little box (literally and figuratively), that I was stunned by women who threw the box out entirely. It was like staring at a fire on the side of the road. You know it’s real and happening, but it shouldn’t be, and I couldn’t look away.
After more of these interactions and more observations of others, I started to realize that I no longer needed to dim my light. That while I am the black sheep of my family because of my ability to express emotions, it is that piece exactly that is what makes part of my light shine.
So I stopped dimming my light. I became more and more confident through my thirties, learning so many more lessons along the way, a huge part of which was learned after fighting breast cancer when I was 29 and 31. I am more committed every day to live life as my truest self. I understand that I am not everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s ok. That doesn’t make me bad or them wrong. What matters is that I am committed to being and becoming the best version of myself that I can be, and I continue to learn.
Soooo…What Does This Have to Do with Parenting?…
As stated before, I really do believe that our own childhoods are essentially the materials given to us to build our own homes for our children. Some of us get really shitty, weak sticks that are tarnished and broken. Others of us get a beautiful, strong, mahogany set of blocks. Most of us get a mixed bag.
But here’s the good news: you can exchange what you have for what you want. You also get to choose what materials get passed on and which end with you. In my next post, I’ll be sharing how I’ve exchanged my broken sticks, what mahogany blocks I’ve kept, and how I build my house for my daughter. Is it perfect? No. But it doesn’t have to be. And I hope that somewhere along the way, I can help you exchange some broken sticks for some mahogany blocks for your home.