Skip to main content

Entering in

In case you hadn't figured this out already, I am not posting here as a parenting expert. I'm posting as a parent who learns on the job! And I'm posting what I'm learning, how I deal with things, at least in part so that my own children can look back on these writings and see what I was trying to do and why.

When my kids were little, I learned a very useful thing from Jean Liedloff's 1970's book The Continuum Concept (which I would recommend as the only book a new parent needs to read, it contains all you need until at least the toddler years), which was, to let my children be. To not push them, prod them, entertain them, monopolise their attention. Charlotte Mason has a good phrase for this: "Masterly Inactivity": the idea that I am around, so there is no need for the child to worry, but I am not the main show. 

They're amazing at teamwork!

So at playgroups for example, I would sit on the side with my coffee and chat with other mothers, or read a book - keeping an eye on the kids certainly, and straight away by their side if a problem arose, but I expected them to entertain themselves there. At home as well, I would only rarely play with them, I would ensure they had a safe space to play together or separately. Play just isn't my thing, and that's ok - this approach certainly yielded me a very peaceful lockdown, as the kids happily spent most of the time playing with each other!

However, things are changing. The kids are growing. I don't have toddlers any more, and the preschoolers have pretty much grown into what this country considers school age kids! This is a whole different ballgame, I find.

Despite having been very self sufficient up to now, they are looking to bring me much more into their world these days. And I'm challenged by that. It doesn't come naturally to me - but their invitations keep coming, and I need to follow - as requested, to enter in to their world rather than to manage it. I can tell they need me to do that now: they want me to see what they're seeing, understand their thinking, they look to me to interpret things - and they also want to enter into my world and see things through my eyes. They are ready.

If I decline too often, whether that's because I have other priorities (housework!?) or because I'm not comfortable following their lead, I know the invitations will become fewer and will eventually dry up. Now is the time, while they still want me, to enthusiastically follow and enter in - so that hopefully in ten years' time, my presence in their lives will be expected and welcomed. 

Enter in. 

Those words are on my mind today, and they challenge me, because they represent a fundamental shift in our relationship - not because I haven't been present in their lives, of course I have, but I have usually been in charge. I have initiated, I have made plans, I knew where things were going. Entering in is different, it's following their invitation into something I haven't planned, am not in charge of. Even if it's just a game, or something they want to look at - they initiate. And I need to overcome my discomfort with not being in charge. 

As they grow, I'm here to grow with them. I'm so here for it.

It's a beautiful adventure and I'm loving it - and I don't want to miss these important opportunities right here, right now. I love that they want me. I just need to let go of that sense of being out of my depth - I'm no child expert! - and just go with my gut. Because instinct isn't just for babies... everything in me is shouting that this is vital, right now, this is important. So I'm jumping in.

Entering in!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...
1 comment
Read more

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...
2 comments
Read more

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs.  They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...
Post a Comment
Read more