It Takes A Special Idiot

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By Russell Turner

Published:
1-March-2005

 If parenting were easy any idiot could do it. As it is, to do it right it takes a special idiot. Being a parent today is much harder than it was even ten years ago. There are several reasons why this is so. Society is changing fast. Many of us feel we have no coherent or relevant model for bringing up children in the twenty-first century.

I believe many of today's parents have come mostly from the smaller families more typical of recent times. While small families often provide greater material comforts and emotional benefits, the older children are usually so close in age to the younger ones that they either cannot, or are not needed to, help bring up or mind their much younger brothers and sisters. When this is the case we, as children, as well as our own children, have no real opportunity to gain early experience in child care that may be applied later with children of our own and their own. Add to this the lack of extended family that is no longer there in many cases to play the same guiding and supporting role that it use to, and you begin to see why being a parent today is so much more difficult.

Many more people today are parenting alone, for a variety of reasons. The decisions and in some cases total lifestyle changes that we often must make are so significant that they will inevitably cause some measure of stress and anxiety. The stress and anxiety of type 1 diabetes comes on top of the stress and anxiety of our everyday lives. If there is only one parent to meet these intense demands the pressure is that much more concentrated.

A troubling trend that I have seen over the past few years is we seem to live in a climate of "professionalism". Everywhere you look there is an "expert" who claims to know better than you how to raise your child. After a while the onslaught of the sheer numbers of these "experts" can cause us to lose confidence in our own judgment. And with these "experts" offering solutions and answers to every conceivable situation we sometime find ourselves setting even higher standards for everything we do.

It's time to say enough! We are not helpless and incapable. We are the experts when it comes to our children. There is no doubt that we face different, and often tougher difficulties than our parents did. We admit some of the difficulty is if our own making. As parents if we want to find out how to be successful in our role, we need look no further than helping our children to develop self-confidence, self-reliance and good feelings about themselves.

There is no blueprint for being the perfect parent. No easy answers or secret formula. Our success is all about understanding, and trusting ourselves and our children, and bringing them up our way. We know our kids better than anyone else. We can do this not because we are so smart or because we have all the answers. We can do this because our children are ours. By showing that we love them, understand them, respect them, and will stand by them no matter what, they will see that we approve of them and will help them to grow up with a strong sense of themselves. This will make them better able to withstand life's difficulties and take advantage of all that life has to offer.

Raising a child is not easy. There are trials and heartbreak, disease, sadness, laughter, joy, and love that knows no bounds. You would have to be an idiot not to jump in with both feet.