So You’ve Decided to Have a Family…

Part I: What Your Parents Did Wrong… and Right

Congratulations! Whether you planned to have a baby right now or were just pleasantly surprised by the next generation knocking on your life-door, now is a very good time to sit down with your partner and openly discuss some of the issues you’ll face as parents. Doesn’t matter if you have just one child, or plan to raise a whole brood. The decisions you make now about your parental roles will affect everyone in the family for better or worse.

Having a baby is just the beginning. As I’ve warned my youngest daughter struggling through morning sickness with her first baby. Raising the child entails a lot of planning and work that new parents often neglect to do before the babies come along. Sure, you can learn by experience – what we used to call the “School of Hard Knocks” – but who really wants to make big mistakes along the way that their children may suffer from?

When we were young and facing parenthood, my husband and I spent many a long night just talking about our own childhoods, and the things we thought our parents did wrong. That’s actually the easy part. You can then come up with some statements about what you won’t do to your own children.

We didn’t like getting hit with weapons (like a belt, a paddle, or the back of a hairbrush), as if a full grow adult’s hand weren’t weapon enough to ‘knock some sense into’ a young child. Ix-nay on the physical beatings. We didn’t like not having our own separate identities, forever being lumped in with all the children when it came to punishments and rewards. So we promised ourselves we wouldn’t assume guilt or innocence equally among our children, and wouldn’t ever call any of them “Hey, You” (yes, there were a lot of kids in my family).

Each couple will bring resentments and fond memories of their childhood to their marriage. It is important to know these, and make a real effort to repeat what went right while avoiding the mistakes yourselves. But that doesn’t mean you won’t invent all new mistakes, so it’s also a good thing to extend a little forgiveness to your parents for their shortcomings. You’ll be in a position to want forgiveness from your children someday too!

After some months of this in-depth parental analysis, I printed our decisions in magic marker on a piece of parchment and framed it to hang on the wall. Where we kept it until the kids started school (and could read it for themselves – watch out for that, they’ll nail you on it).

Nor did we abide our decisions completely, all the time. It’s very easy to become overwhelmed by the stresses and strains of everyday life with children, and automatically fall into the patterns our parents set – they’re really all we DO know about parenting at the primal level. So despite my solemn oath never to hit my children, when they decided to play in the street one day and the screeching of tires barely missing them sent my heart somewhere down around my ankles, I did it.

I busted their little butts – over my knee, just like my Mom did for a similar infraction when I was maybe 3. Didn’t really hurt them (certainly not like that car could have hurt them!), but I felt bad and never did it again. Of course, it was so out of character that they never tried playing in the street again either. I count that as a good lesson learned. You can reason with ‘em all day on something like that and it’ll mean exactly squat if they decide to test your theories and end up dead or in ICU for months.

So take the time to have these discussions with your mate, and get some ideas about the directions you do and don’t want to go with your own children. There are of course many more issues that must be explored as your family begins to grow, and I’ll talk about some of those in later posts. Some of you will no doubt be happy to know that there’s a lot of research out there about these things – what children need, what parents need, what families need. So be sure and stay tuned!

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