What is good enough?
I want to learn new parenting skills every day. My most humble ambition is to know exactly what I want to develop in my kids. For that I need to be sure that reason precede my actions in everything I do & be able to explain it to myself & my kids at any time. The outcome I desire depends on the methods I will employ that makes sense to me at that time. I want to understand my kids, their habits, their internal mechanisms & I want them to understand me.
Our concern to understand our kids & our quest for a better way of parenting & developing them HAS to bring greater understanding to the phases our children grow through. This all start with me...I need to understand my own reasoning & find the ideas that have meaning to me as a Parent.
But how can I be so confident & so unsure at the same time?
My invested attitude toward my kids cause me to investigate things...& that I think might just be all the confidence I need. I simply don't know everything, so my confidence lie in my ability to always find a better way of thinking & doing for the sake of my children, because I never stop looking. If this was not true about myself, I would never process these thoughts to start with.
I see myself so clearly in "that 1 person we all know" that go around telling people they don't care what others think. Those that claim they don't care...actually care very much, so much in fact that it bothers them to the point where they have to talk about it & it always seems to me, like they are trying to convince themselves of the contrary more than those they are talking to. When something bother & brew in us long enough it oozes out into our speech & conversations. Those that truly don't care about something...never talk about it, because it's never even a thought. Once I realized that people can't hide how much they really care, I had my evidence that I am truly invested in my kids. If I wasn't...it would never be thought, remember.
But how do we know that we are not failing in spite our industrious & resourceful approach? Our evidence lie in our relentless pursuit to read allot & listen to our kids when they let us know what it is like being on the receiving end of us. A company that produce goods has to listen to its consumers. Until there is more positive than negative feedback, they keep developing refining what they make.
Why am I then also so unsure at times?
Being unsure about something is mainly because something is new for me, I haven't been here before, I haven't faced this yet & no one has showed me how. Our children study us with eagle eyes. They KNOW we are the mediums by which most of their needs are fulfilled. They have to know us very well to get what they want. (Sometimes I wonder who's ahead of the game here...Me or Them). The biggest uncertainty of all is finding an idea that work BOTH ways, for me AND my kids. Almost a Golden Ratio that fits into our "cultural & religious frames".
Having kids is having your HEART run around outside your body & I can't help but feel that NO ONE can love my babies like I do & No one can laugh with them like I do...no one can enjoy & care for them & pay attention to them the way I do. Our concern to understand our kids & our quest for a better way of parenting & developing them HAS to bring greater understanding to the phases our children grow through. This all starts with us...
We have to believe in ourselves, because We are probably the best shot they have @ experiencing love without condition.
We can do this.