parenting

The Anxiety of Screwing Up as a Parent

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
My kids (two white boys, one in a blue t-shirt and one in a black sweatshirt) walking on a maze printed on a giant carpet-like mat

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” As a parent, that line from poet Philip Larkin strikes a lot differently than it used to.

Lived experience doesn’t help much on this front. With a “what are you going to do?” shrug, my mother-in-law informed me that you’ll do your best as a parent but there will still be things that your kids will disagree with your parenting or think are hurtful as an adult. Similarly, I hear people talk about how adults said small things to them – for both good and bad – that the adult probably doesn’t remember, but the person has carried with them their whole lives.

The fact is, doing something to screw up my kids is one of my biggest fears as a parent. Not that I’m perfect – far from it. I know I mess up and genuinely apologize to my kids to make up for it.

What I’m scared of is messing up in some major way and having no idea I did so.

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Building Character Whether We Want to or Not

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of a tiny orange newt on the bark of a fallen log with moss

“I swear, this hike felt a lot easier when I was 15,” I said to my kids, huffing as we hauled up what seemed like the endlessly steep mountain.

I had promised an “easy, fun, not that long” hike. I was right that it wasn’t that long. What I had forgotten was that it was nearly straight up, complete with patches of steep, smooth rock. It had rained the night before, making everything slippery as hell.

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Opportunity, Risk, and Bad Ideas

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
My younger son (a white boy in a black sweatshirt) standing on a playground merry-go-round as it is spinning, with a row of pine trees behind him

Sometimes your kids take a cautionary tale as an questionable opportunity.

When I was about eight – old enough for my front teeth to be permanent – my mom sent me off to the park for the first time without her. I was with our next door neighbor, who was a few years older than me. He was supposed to be the responsible one.

I was quite fond of hanging upside down from various items of playground equipment, including things that probably shouldn’t have been hung upside down from. Including the bars on the infamous merry-go-round.

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What does equity and equality have to do with being spoiled?

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
An illustration of people looking over the fence at the baseball game, where there is reality where the tallest person has a bunch of boxes and the shortest is in a hole, equality where they are all on one box, equity where the tallest person doesn't have a box, the middle has one box and the shortest has two boxes, and liberation, where the fence is gone altogether
Images have been created by Craig Froehle, Angus Maguire, the Center for Story-Based Strategy and the Interaction Institute for Social Change.

“But he’s spoiled!” my older son proclaimed loudly, expressing his opinion that his brother always gets what he wants.

Now, his claim is blatantly untrue. In fact, my older son is probably the one who gets what he wants more often just because he has stronger opinions. My younger son is more likely to say, “Yeah, sure, that sounds good.”

But I wasn’t going to get into that conversation. I knew it wasn’t going to go anywhere and just turn into the nonsense of trying to list every time that my older son got what he wanted.

Instead, I took a different angle. “Well, you know that we do try very hard to be fair. But fair doesn’t always mean equal.”

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Watching My Kids Get a Little More Independent Day by Day

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
A white boy in a rain jacket on a bike on the sidewalk next to a parking lot, with an adult on a bike in the background

“Hey, does anyone want to go down to the creek?” I asked my kids, who were sprinting across the sprawling playground equipment at a local park.

“No, we’re racing,” my older son replied.

“Well, I want to go down to the creek,” I said, with a hint of whine in my voice.

“You can,” he stated, plain as day.

“That’s true, I can!” The fact that they could play on their own, that they were big enough not to be constantly supervised and could come get me if there was a problem popped into my head like a cartoon lightbulb.

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On Making Cakes and Finding Your Strengths

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A cake of a brick with big cartoon eyes and legs

I am terrible at making cakes. It involves both baking and decorating skills that I have never and are likely to never possess. Thankfully, I am not the designated cook or baker in our family. That’s all my husband.

My husband never planned to be a cook or stay at home dad. In college, he was a chemistry and then political science major. Frankly, he had no idea what he wanted to be.

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Finding Rest as a Parent Even When You Don’t Want To

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Trees with orange and brown leaves lit by an unknown source of light, as there is a cloudy sky with gray clouds overhead

“You should be so available to play that your children never need to ask,” read the meme. Or least that’s how I read it. (Although it really was close to it.) But what if they always want more than I have to offer? I thought in desperation.

Other memes or oversimplified advice extolled the virtues of connection, especially when it came to getting your kids to do what you want or need them to do, like brush their teeth or come to the table for dinner. Some even made the connection explicit, saying that your kids will be cooperative if only you’re connected enough with them. Of course that message implies the opposite – that if they aren’t cooperative, it’s because you aren’t connected enough.

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Moving from watching to participating as a parent

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Photo of my kids (two white boys in t-shirts) in a carnival ride that has a bucket on an arm that spins around

“You aren’t supposed to lead play, just watch,” the parenting expert voice in the back of my head said. So I sat there on the living room floor and watched, keeping my mouth closed, lest I pass judgment on how my kid was playing.

Even though something felt ‘off’ about this statement, I couldn’t help but see it as the culmination of so much parenting advice – and more strikingly, parent shaming.

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How a book can start a conversation

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Selfie of me (a white woman in a teal t-shirt) holding up the book A Day With No Words in front of a bookshelf

As I finished reading this beautiful book with my younger son, we read the section in the back where the author (Fidgets and Fries) describes how it’s based on her relationship with her nonspeaking autistic son, although he’s older now than the kid in the book. I mentioned that she’s autistic as well, as is her younger son.

“What’s autistic again?” asked my son. “I forgot.”

So I explained to him how it’s a set of ways some people’s brains are different than the average, including differences in communication, reading social cues, interests, sensory perception, and sometimes coordination. (We have multiple neurodivergences in our family, so he’s familiar with the idea of people’s brains being different from the average.)

I then paused and thought about how to phrase what I was going to say next. “I think I might be autistic too. It’s sometimes hard to tell when you’re an adult and have learned some of those skills.” He nodded, not particularly surprised that my brain (or anyone’s in our family) doesn’t work like the average person’s.

Thank you to Tiffany Hammond for writing such a beautiful book that offers both important representation and the opportunity to start and continue important conversations about the beautiful diversity of all of our brains.