A Parenting Philosophy: Do I Need One? (Part 2)

Parenting Accountability: It's Important

Read Part 1 of A Parenting Philosophy

Part 2

My parenting actions look pretty scattered and would often convince an outsider that there is no method to my madness. My decisions are different for each child, based on my calculations of the parent that they need for that moment. My calculations are often wrong but I still try and reach for that calculator each time. The philosophy that underlies my parenting behaviors, I realize, may be well-hidden when observing my parenting decisions but there is still a philosophy that guides and anchors me and helps me decide how to act but more importantly helps me evaluate later if I stayed true to my parenting message. It is a compass to guide the direction of my action and no, I don’t think I can share it. It is more a knowing of what I want for my children. It is not a prescription for an easy life. Although, if I could prescribe it I would, not an easy life, but a happy one. It is not a definition of success. It is fulfillment for them and for society. I fight against what society would define as fulfilling for them and try to think more about what actually would be enhancing for society from them. I try and think about how to best equip my kids to be able to identify their own fulfillment and to be able to go into the world and get it, believing that I have raised them so that their fulfillment will bring joy and success to themselves and the world.

I know that this guide of self-fulfillment for my children looks like a very fickle guide, indeed. One moment my response to my child is an attempt to promote empathy but in the same discussion I am promoting what may look like a less than empathic response in my child, because perhaps at that moment I’m trying to promote resiliency. My parenting may also look different across children. In one child, I may be trying to decrease anxiety and, in another child, when I am reacting to a similar situation, I may be judging that a touch more anxiety may be necessary. (Yes. I said it.) Sometimes it may look like I am promoting anxiety to the outside observer, not an overwhelming anxiety, a manageable one, but anxiety none-the-less. What I am actually promoting is accountability. One that serves as a prompt, a call to explore the reasons behind your emotions, your actions, a self-knowledge. I have found in therapy that self-knowledge, self-awareness, cannot exist without some anxiety, a drive for an accountability that each person owes themselves and others.

As I am sure is evident, I suffer from a touch of parenting anxiety. To me, this anxiety is a call to accountability. It’s an accountability to my parenting philosophy and to my kids. I do think parents committed to thinking about their overarching parenting philosophy, accountable to that philosophy and putting in time to evaluate if they have acted in line with their guiding philosophy is time well-spent. I think that in those moments that you know are ‘big’ parenting moments you have a base from which to ask yourself what response communicates what I want my kids to have. In those little moments when you did not realize you were parenting, I find that having a philosophy, if you have absorbed it at the core level of who you are as a parent, will guide you or at least, sound the alarm when you are betraying it.

My hope is that most of the time my parenting is a gifting to my kids. Often, I know it’s an indoctrination of my kids and unfortunately, I am aware that sometimes, it is a damaging of my kids. I try, however, to have it guided by an overarching philosophy, an understanding of what I hope to give to my kids and I, also, try to hold myself accountable to judging if my behaviors were in line with my philosophy. As I told my friend the other day, joking but not, “I try to do my best parenting and when I know I have messed it up, I apologize and move on, modeling self-forgiveness; for them, of course.”

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