Tag: mom

My job is not to make my kids happy

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I got angry the other day. My kids were fighting over who got to sleep on the trampoline, and there was no combination that existed that would make them happy. If I made some kids happy, others started crying. And I was very frustrated.

I had to take a break and walk away. I thought of the problem a little more and realized that I couldn’t solve the problem as it currently existed. The solution I wanted was to make all my kids happy. But their preferences didn’t align in a way that I could do that successfully.

I could try to incentivize them in some way, such as letting the kids who didn’t sleep on the trampoline watch a movie. But that was just creating more problems–and those sorts of incentives can be extremely costly to me.

So I realized that the easiest way to solve the problem was to stop trying to make my kids happy. When I relaxed that requirement, a lot more solutions became available. And I no longer felt overwhelmed by an impossible problem.

When my kids were babies, when they cried, I needed to help them. But as they got older, they wanted more and more things. And sometimes what they want doesn’t make sense.

In a way, it’s easy to try to just give my kids what they want. Because then they stop whining, and I hate hearing them cry and complain. But they need to learn, more than they need satsification.

I need to provide food, clothing, shelter, education, love. I do not need to provide happiness, entertainment, treats, movies, video games, and solutions to all of their problems. My kids want more of me than I can give sometimes, but I can use that as a way to teach them to become more self-reliant, more grateful, more kind to each other, and harder workers.

Relatedly, I’ve stopped trying to make things fair all the time. Sometimes things just aren’t fair. Someone will get more birthday presents, or more dessert, or more time with friends. Sometimes I treat my kids differently because they are different, and because I don’t have the time and energy to equally distribute everything.

I still think fairness can be very important virtue. But fairness as a virtue doesn’t mean noticing when someone else has more and wanting more as well. That selfish fairness is not usually helpful or virtuous. What is better is using fairness as a way to share, to help those who have less, and to notice people who are left out.

I don’t need to be the sole distributor of fairness in my family. I don’t need to keep giving my kids more and more and more. I can teach them to share with each other instead, to be grateful for what they have, and to be okay even if someone has more than they do.

Two of the kids slept on the trampoline. Two of them who wanted to did not. The ones that did not were not happy about it. But I explained my reasoning, and then I let them feel however they wanted to feel. And honestly, once I made the decision, they weren’t as upset as I feared they would be. They don’t actually expect to always get what they want all the time. But if they think they can get it by crying and complaining, they are more likely to cry and complain.

Sometimes being the best mom I can be means not making everyone happy, explaining to my kids why I can’t give them what they would like, and holding to my decisions. That’s teaching them.

Being a Parent

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Parenting is a concept where we act in order to have results. We parent our children so that they can go to bed, do well in school, act in certain ways, and think how we want them to think.

But what if we switch from parenting our children to being a loving parent? Instead of working to have certain outcomes (the verb form–parenting), we instead focus to be the best we can, regardless of what happens next.

Today at bedtime, I wanted my kids to calm down and go to sleep. So I decided to employ some good parenting techniques: we played a few games, I read stories, sang songs, and tried to show love and attention to my children. But I wanted results. I was parenting: if I did it right, then my kids would calm down and go to sleep.

Do you know what happened? They would not calm down. They giggled and they would not listen. I was trying to do the right thing, or so I thought, but I was doing the right thing only for a certain conclusion that was not happening. (And then I got very frustrated, which did not help anything.)

Parenting (working for specific results) is not effective because kids are people and people make choices. That means that even if we parent perfectly, we may not ever be able to get our kids to think and respond in the ways we want.

But being a better parent is not dependent on the outcome. It’s just doing what is right no matter what happens. If the kids are misbehaving and disrespecting and being horrible, I can always be a loving parent. I can control what I do–and this is a lot easier if I’m not attached to results.

I have to let go of my parenting goals and those expectations I want. Which means I have to stop thinking and googling things like “how do I make my kids (go to sleep, do well in school, stop hitting each other, listen to me, respect others, etc.).” I have to realize that my kids will make choices that I do not like. And that they will do this a lot, and I cannot control it.

I can guide them, love them, and teach them. There can be consequences to actions. I can tell them what is right and wrong.

But at the end of the day, I will never be able to force them to go to sleep (or do so many other things). Instead, I can only force myself to love them even more.

Forget about being a good or bad parent . . .

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How many times have you told yourself that you’re a good mom/dad or a bad mom/dad? You’ve probably done it a lot–and if you are like me, you are usually saying to yourself that you aren’t good enough.

The thought of being a good parent or a bad parent is not very useful. First, who is coming up with the classification anyway? We are all very different people and we have our individual ways of doing things, so there is no universal ideal of a good parent.

We create our own ideas of what a good parent is and what a bad parent is. And when we measure ourselves against the ideal, we forget that we made it up in our heads.

And usually we are doing some things better than other things. And parenting is so huge, that even when we do something well, there is something else that we are forgetting to do. We can’t be perfect parents all at once. It’s sort of impossible.

So we should stop telling ourselves that we are good or bad parents. It doesn’t do any good at all. It’s not the point, anyway. The point is to love our children, not to get a passing grade in parenting.

We should keep striving to be better–but we should do it for the benefit of our children, not so that we feel good about ourselves.

And in the end of it, I don’t want to be a good mom as much as I want to be an instrument in the hands of God to do what he would have me do. And that may mean forgetting about whether I am a good mom or a bad mom and just trying a little harder.