parenting philosophy

Raising Sprout

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

Gardening has been on my mind a lot lately.

Last weekend, we visited the White House Garden, during one of the two days a year they open the gates to the general public. While Chris had previously been there for a sustainable food event in culinary school, I had never been. Although I was temporarily confused by the presence of tulips in the Rose Garden (roses are out of season), I enjoyed seeing the location of so many big announcements. I eagerly peered around crowds for a view of the White House kitchen garden and tried not to be stung by an occupant of the White House beehive. Meanwhile, Sprout was completely uninterested in the plants. However, he was enamored with holding on to the black lacquered security fence. No accounting for taste!

The next day, I worked in my own garden while Chris played with Sprout on the lawn. I planted sunflowers, arugula, chives, and peanuts, all of which are new to my garden this year. Next week, I’ll be transplanting my seedlings and sprouts of tomatoes, peppers, melon, beans, peas, and squash.

Because everything relates to parenting for me, I started thinking about how starting seeds is like parenting: you need to build good soil, be willing to get your hands (and everything else) dirty, and provide gradual transitions.

I believe a gardener’s job is more about cultivating good soil than growing plants. It’s all about creating the right conditions – plenty of light, the right amount of nutrients, the right amount of water, and the right temperatures. Not too little or too much of any one element. If you’re thoughtful about where you place your garden and prepare the soil well, even a large garden doesn’t need they much upkeep.

Just like I can’t actually make the seeds grow, I can’t and don’t want to have complete control over my son. I want him to develop at his own pace, without rushing or pressuring him. I want to model and create the circumstances around him that inspire a love of learning, enjoyment of nature, and compassion towards people. I see a child’s ideal soil as lots of hugs, physical and mental space to explore, play with kids of various ages, time spent outside, exposure to arts and music, and quality time with parents and other caring adults. While parents should try to provide as much of this as possible, they can’t do it alone. Fortunately, we have wonderful parents ourselves, a strong church community, activities offered through the town, and friends that support us. As with a garden, we hope a thoughtful approach and hard work up front will pay off later in a capable, caring kid.

In both cases, building good soil involves getting your hands dirty. My gardening style is literally earthy – I’ve always enjoying playing in the dirt. I don’t wear gardening gloves because they make me feel clumsy. Sometimes rather than use a trowel, I scoop potting soil out of the bag with my hands. After I garden, my hands and nails always have dirt ground into them.

Similarly, you can never escape the mess as a parent. Sprout has peed on me, sneezed ground bison on me, sprayed tomatoes and beef on me while blowing a raspberry, wiped snot on my shirt, and caused me to get poop on my hands. He has bit me on the nipple, knee, and arm. I’ve wiped drool off of his chin more times than I can count and have already committed the ultimate mom sin of using own spit to clean his face. (I swore I never would!) I’m far too familiar with the sticky pink goo that is Ora-Gel. I’ve looked like the walking dead after near-sleepless nights. I’ve been in my pajamas far too late in the day and changed into them far too early in the evening. Not that I was ever fashionable, but pumping and nursing drive a surprising amount of my wardrobe choices. I happily sit in the grass, watching Sprout rip up weeds and inspect leaves. Getting dirty is what we do around here.

Lastly, I think we need to respect the cycles and transitions of nature and children. When you raise seeds in early spring, you need to harden them off before you transfer them to the soil. Inside, they stay one temperature with consistent watering and light. If you take them from that controlled environment and plant them outside without first exposing them to the elements – sun, wind, temperature changes – they go into shock. They then die or are weaker than they would be otherwise. Like the baby plants, kids also need to be at first very protected then slowly exposed to the real world before adulthood. That small amount of exposure and gradual transition makes them far more resilient in the face of difficult situations.

Approaching change as a series of slow transitions works for less dramatic changes too. While it took about six (hard) months, our sleep training approach of moving from nursing to rocking to holding to being present and then to laying him down by himself has paid off. We made it through with a minimum of crying (albeit a lot of whining). Now, he’s asleep within 10 minutes and usually only wakes up once a night. Similarly, we think he’ll do pretty well when we go to Disney World this summer because he’s used to the busyness of the city and crowds of people. While some people refer to these in-between steps as a crutch, I would rather supply him with a crutch and transition away from it than have him fall hard on his face at first and be discouraged from trying again.

While most of the plants in my garden only last a season, how I treat Sprout will last a lifetime. Thankfully, he’s pretty forgiving and there are always more opportunities to get down and dirty.

Risks and Rewards

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

I want Sprout to be a free range kid. I want him to be able to go to the park by himself, explore the neighborhood, and when he’s old enough, take the Metro into the city. I want him to climb trees and rocks. But right now, I kind of want to outfit him with a helmet.

In the last few weeks, Sprout has racked up the milestones: crawling forward, getting two teeth in, and pulling up to his knees (and today to his feet!). While the others pose their own challenges, it’s the last one that makes me gasp. Except for the continuing allure of the sproingy doorstop, pulling up on everything is his new favorite activity. In his opinion, the couch, our wooden and metal coffee table, bookshelves, his crib bars, the mesh sides of the pack-and-play, my pant legs and the wall are all excellent surfaces to conquer. At first, he didn’t know how to get down, so he’d just tumble over.

He’s fortunately gotten better at balancing, but that’s just made him bolder. He regularly pushes against the wall, leaning backwards to bat at the curtain, not understanding that leaning on and holding on are not the same thing. Perhaps some yearning for adventure was embedded in his genes when I rock-climbed early in my pregnancy.

We’ve tried to vigilantly prevent accidents, but have been far from successful. We try to prevent him from hitting his head on our hardwood floor by spotting him, but he always manages to fall in the one direction we don’t predict. He cries, then shakes it off quickly after a good hug from mommy or daddy. Even though he’s recovered after each incident and the pediatrician says not to worry about it unless he passes out, I still feel terrible every time it happens. I’m always convinced that brain damage is imminent.

I’m torn between wanting to encourage his adventurousness and protecting him, a conflict I know will only grow more challenging as he gets older. If I’m worried about him bumping his head now, how much harder will it be when he’s on the playground equipment or high up in a tree? Some of my most cherished childhood memories were doing things that are banned or at least discouraged during recess today. Even now, my outdoor hobbies involve some level of physical danger, from rock climbing to urban biking. My life is better for having these activities in it and I think his will be as well.

As Sprout gets older, I think the best compromise between these positions is to teach him how to take calculated risks. Rather than doing everything or nothing, it’s best to take a measured approach to risk. Thinking about your own capabilities, evaluating the difficulty of the action you want to take, and working to reduce the risk as much as possible can provide a framework for making good decisions in general. To go back to rock-climbing, I personally do not boulder (climb short routes without ropes) more than a few feet off the ground unless I’m confident in my ability to climb back down. If I’m going to do a route at the edge of my current ability, I use ropes, harnesses and other safety equipment to reduce the risk of falling. While it’s obvious how these principles apply to physical risks (no one wants to be stuck in a tree like a cat), they also apply to big life decisions. From taking a difficult college class to moving to another country, every major decision has risks associated with it. There’s always a possibility of failure, but calculated risks help you figure out how to minimize it and recover if you fail. Some people in my generation are having difficulty dealing with adulthood because their parents never let them make these big decisions at all, much less taught them the critical thinking skills to deal with the risks.

Unfortunately, Sprout doesn’t understand the word “no” yet, much less have the capacity for any critical thought. But now and in the future, we’ll be there to spot him when we can and hug him when he falls.

Wonderful, Awesome, Amazing – But Not Perfect

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 11 Comments

“He’s perfect” has been my mom’s refrain about my son since the day he was born. While I adore my child, I wince every time she says it. It makes me want to yell out, “He isn’t!” Because to me, perfect is confining and static, the opposite of my vibrant, growing baby.

Imperfect isn’t bad, just flawed. It’s challenging, offering us space to evolve. Imperfections connect us so that we can fill in the gaps of each other’s weaknesses.

I haven’t always held this attitude; it took decades for me to adopt. I’m a recovering perfectionist. My mom tells a story about me as a baby playing with a shape-sorter. After several minutes of fitfully cramming a shape in the wrong hole, I violently threw down the toy. While I became less physical about it, I maintained a philosophy that said, “If you’re going to do something, you should Do It Right.” Unfortunately, my version of “Doing It Right” meant I held impossibly high standards that even I couldn’t meet. A fear of not living up to my potential lurked in the background, a monster that could erase my hard work and expose me as a fraud.

Entering parenthood, I realized that this mindset just wasn’t going to work. Contrary to the parenting guides, there is no One Right Way. There’s Right for Now or Not Too Bad or The Best that I Can Do. Parenting is a slick, ever-changing thing, like one of those water worms that slips out of your hands. Every time you think you finally have a grasp, something changes, whether it’s your child, the situation, or the expectations.

Pursuing perfection locks you in, denies you the fluidity you need. One of my favorite parenting books, Babies in the Rain, compares raising children to a dance. In this duet, the child leads and you follow, always working together. But if you focus exclusively on following the rhythm, you turn it into a series of stilted steps. I know how unhelpful this perspective is in music; my jazz teacher was always telling me to experience the emotion rather than only paying attention to the beats. His response frustrated me at the time – how can I “let go” if I can’t even get the fundamentals right? But now, I can only think of how paralyzing this attitude would be in parenting.

Personally, the biggest challenge to my perfectionism has been sleep, that intimidating foe. At first, I approached the “sleep through the night” goal the same way I approach every major goal – by creating a individualized, step-by-step plan. I formulated a approach that started with not nursing my baby to sleep and over time, shortening the period of time I would rock him. Then I would move to holding him in my lap and eventually not needing to pick him up at all as he fell asleep peacefully in his crib. Hilarious.

His first cold presented the initial obstacle, and then the second and third ones came along. As I would do anything to help him (and me) get some rest, not nursing to sleep went out the window. Some nights he mistakenly falls asleep nursing and I don’t have it in me to wake him up. We’ve finally gotten to the point where he can fall asleep in my lap, but not until after several minutes of violently fighting it. Tactics that work one week stop working the next. And teething keeps finding a way to interrupt our progress.

In response, I’ve started shrugging my shoulders and carrying on. What else can I do? He doesn’t know or care that I have a plan. I want to follow the lead of my partner instead of dragging him around the dance floor.

Besides restricting your flexibility, pursuing perfect also blinds you to beauty. It catches you up in a whirlwind, never allowing you to see how much good you already have in your life. A recent article talks brilliantly about how “leaning in” ala Sheryl Sandberg, otherwise known as believing you can do everything if only you try hard enough, has made the author miserable. In the past, when I’ve tried to be perfect, I’ve just stressed myself out.

Fortunately, I’ve been more content post-baby than I’ve ever been. I love spending time with him, watching him just being himself. If I was preoccupied with being perfect, I’d be vacuuming the carpet instead of watching him peer under it with glee. (What can possibly be so interesting under there?) I’d be horrified with him biting the restaurant’s granite tabletop rather then giggling at his questionable taste. I would have been worried about his lack of progress when he was only crawling backwards instead of taking photos of him happily stuck under his crib. I wouldn’t let him grab or gnaw on his books’ pages and so not experience the joy of him learning to turn the pages on his own.

These days, besides the doctor’s appointments and other logistical requirements, I have just a single parenting goal. My husband, paragon of laid-back approaches, permanently added to our weekly To-Do list “Raise [Sprout] to be a good person.” Not perfect, just good.

I love my son too much to see him as perfect. And I love him too much to try to be perfect myself.

To Schedule or Not to Schedule?

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

My mother-in-law recently commented that she was surprised at how “regimented” my husband’s and my parenting style is. I blinked and responded, “Really?” I tend to associate that word more with military school than our relatively laid-back life. While her use of that word was strong, I now understand after hearing her contrast her and our approach. Basically, we have a schedule for feeding him and sleeping (especially bedtime), while she did not. But it’s an strategy that works for us and I hope will continue to serve us well when Sprout grows older.

Currently, Sprout’s schedule is much more about providing discipline for us as parents than him as a child. If we didn’t maintain some sort of schedule, he’d hardly nap and turn into a very cranky baby. Similarly, he won’t tell us when it’s time for him to eat solid foods, so having an approximately scheduled time helps us remember. His schedule also keeps me honest as a mom. Having his bedtime routine start around 7 PM forces me to leave work promptly. The schedule creates time for play as much as it does the “essentials.”

Besides helping us as parents, I think having a structure will benefit him when he gets older. I’m a fan of the book Simplicity Parenting, which promotes creating a “rhythm” in your household. The author asserts that a schedule provides children with a home base they can return to when other areas of their lives are chaotic. For example, they know that whatever challenges they face at school, they can find comfort in having dinner with their parents.

But we’ll need to prevent ourselves from going too far in the other direction too. If Sprout follows my over-achiever tendencies, he’ll have a whole list of extracurricular activities. When there’s so much going on, it’s easy to overlook the most valuable time that occurs in-between organized pursuits. When I was in sixth grade, we had a lesson on study habits where the homework was to write out a schedule for your night. I wrote out my schedule to the minute, with activities even planned for the 10 minutes spent in the car. Did I, conscientious to the point of being a little obsessive, follow this schedule? No way. Because I didn’t schedule in any “non-scheduled” time to rest my mind or talk to my parents about my day. A schedule should be a coat that keeps you warm and enables you to explore the world, not a straightjacket that won’t let you leave the house.

Based on my philosophies and life experiences, I’m taking the same approach towards scheduling my parenting as I do my travel – being prepared for the “required” elements while making space for lots of free time and exploration. If you don’t prepare at all for your vacation, you spend half of your time trying to find a hostel or arguing about what to do next. You miss out on the best museum because you didn’t know about it or failed to make reservations. On the other hand, if you schedule every minute of the day, you miss out on unexpected pleasures not mentioned in guidebooks, like back-alleyways in Barcelona or ruined abbeys in Ireland.

Like everything else in parenting, it seems like scheduling is a matter of flexibility, finding a way to raft the river by working with the ebb and flow of our family, not against it.