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When I was in sixth grade, I asked my parents for a 10-speed bike. I had picked out the perfect bike—the Huffy Capri which came in a beautiful gray and pink. It was not an expensive bike. I found it at KMart. But Christmas and then my spring birthday came and went with no bike. I don’t recall the cost of the bike, but before summer started, I decided to buy it myself. I saved up money from my babysitting jobs which paid between $3-$4 an hour, so I am guessing it was 20-25 hours of babysitting before I had enough. I rode that bike the two to three miles to the center of town and my friends’ houses all summer. And I started a journal entitled What I Will Do When I Am a Parent. The first entry was on why parents should buy their children—can you guess?—bikes.
I recently spent some time going through boxes of my childhood things trying to find this particular journal. I was a prolific journaler as a teenager. Somehow, I couldn’t find my journals among the boxes of college papers, syllabi, data from grad research—things I really should go through with an aim to get rid of most of it. But that requires a good stretch of time and patience. I can’t recall any of the other things my teenaged self thought I would do almost two decades later when I became a parent. The impetus for the journal—purchasing a bike—is the only thing that has stuck with me.
When Z was in first grade at the charter school, he came home a few times early in the year with card changes. The charter school used a negative reinforcement model for behavioral expectations. They had a system of color-coded cards to indicate when a child was not performing up to their strict standards. If you had a rule infraction, your card would change to a different color. Each color had punishments that went along with them such as time out of recess and eventually, being sent to the disciplinarian’s office. My sweet, rule-following six year old came home with a card change for talking with his friend at lunch. Then a second followed a week or so later for saying he needed to use the bathroom urgently but not running to the bathroom when he was given permission to go. (I don’t get it either, believe me.)
My reaction should have been to take him out of the charter school then and there. It would’ve saved us all a lot of headaches and heartache later on, but that’s a story for another day. Instead, my reaction was to be upset with my young boy. It was an outsized reaction, not matching what was going on, what I knew of my child. [Psychology life hack here: If your reaction to something seems disproportionate, it is probably activating something else from your past. It’s a good idea to try and identify what is getting activated to help you figure out what part of your response belongs to the past and what belongs to the current situation. Example follows below.]
It only took me a few times of getting overly upset about these card changes to realize that I was not seeing this situation clearly. When I was in middle and high school, I put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed and do exceptionally well in school. I wanted to go to college and get out of the small town in which I was growing up. College was my ticket out. But college was more money than my parents could afford, so I knew I had to get scholarships to pay my way through school. This lead to perfectionism and high anxiety about doing well. I set very high stakes for myself. And I was applying those same stakes and expectations to Z without even realizing it. Once I uncovered this, my response to Z could be much more appropriately matched to his needs. He had very different needs than I had had.
I think about this a lot as a parent—when am I parenting my children according to what I needed or wanted as a similar-aged child and when I am parenting my children according to what they are demonstrating they need. It’s pretty common to parent our children according to what we thought worked or didn’t work in our own upbringing. We don’t teach people how to parent, don’t require any formal education on child development or parenting skills. While many of us read books on parenting, the books are not always written by people who have expertise in raising children. Sometimes, they are economists (no, I am not a fan) or lawyers (also not a fan). Even having an understanding of how children develop doesn’t necessarily give you great parenting advice. Humans are variable and different. What worked for one child will be an abject failure for another. Some parents find sleep training essential, while others can’t bear to even read about letting their baby cry it out. We do our best. We talk with our parent friends, our own parents, aunts and uncles, people we trust to try and puzzle through the hard times with support.
But I owe it to my children to try and really see and hear them, to understand what they need. It’s hard work, just as many things about parenting are. And I’m already juggling work, marriage, friendships, family and community obligations, the day-to-day of parenting. It can feel second nature to assume that whatever else I recorded in that journal several decades ago is what should guide my parenting. After all, wouldn’t my teenage self have some insight into what a teenager needs? I was pretty self aware, even as a teen. But I was self aware—I had some idea of what would’ve helped me as a teen. While I am sure some overlap exists, my teens are different from each other. And they are certainly different from me. The world they are growing up in is significantly different than the world teenaged Rachel occupied. From the political and cultural climate to the earth’s climate to the values of the state in which we are raising them to the small city they were born and raised in to the culture of our home—all these things are quite different than 1980s suburban Pennsylvania.
So I can think about my first semester of college and remember how I felt. I am sure some universal experiences are there—homesickness, loneliness, adjustment to being on your own for the first time, excitement about all the new beginnings and opportunities. But Z is not me. Anymore than he was me as a first grader. I can feel some sadness and apprehension that L is choosing to let go of a passion I share and understand (theater) for a pursuit I don’t (wrestling). But the reasons that I didn’t like team sports are not issues for L. My job is to learn about the benefits of wrestling and get behind his enthusiasm, not stand in opposition to it. Once again, L is not me. I can worry about M if I expect the way he socializes with friends to match what felt right to me as a teen. Or I can support and trust that he is doing what works for him. He is not me.
I will say with a nod to my 12-year-old self, that not one of my boys have ever bought themselves a bike because we have been lucky enough to have the financial means to provide them.
In fact, Z got a brand new bike when he graduated from high school.
I don’t think any of them would argue with 12-year-old Rachel about that directive.
All photos were taken by the exceptional Dana Giuliana, unless otherwise noted.