"Our children stand in our shadow" - food for thought!

Philip Larkin’s opinions on parents are well known and somewhat sheepishly acknowledged. You can find the poem by searching for ‘This be the verse’. There are kinder ways to put it. After all we are doing our best!

For instance, my teacher used to say, “you stand in my shadow”. He meant that he stood between his students and the light of… well, he meant the divine, or perhaps reason. Truth and wisdom also fit.

My teacher was acknowledging that his ability to reveal wisdom to us was limited by his ability not to block out the light with his own ignorance or his inability to convey the truth so we could hear it. 

Our ability to be good parents is limited by our ability to get it right in all sorts of ways. How we respond to difficult behaviour, teach our children many different life lessons, and develop their skills.  

Like my teacher, and with the same humility, we can acknowledge that our ability to parent our children in the best way is limited by our understanding of their inside perspective. 

We don’t just magically know how to say things in a way our children can hear, and respond to in the way we want. In the heat of the moment, we don’t have wizardly power to always respond in a way which is most beneficial to our children. 

It’s not difficult if we remember that we need to learn about our children as fast as our children are learning about the world. They have an advantage - they are constantly developing new skills and understanding which challenges us as parents to find new ways to respond. Whereas we as parents sometimes get stuck in routines which no longer work. 

We do some things in exactly the way our parents did - because that worked for us. Just as often, we decide we will not do what our parents did, because it didn’t. That’s alright… but it’s not a learning perspective. 

Your child is not you. Let that really sink in. They are a separate person, like you in some ways, but also very different. Their experiences are unique, and their world is different to the world you knew as a child.

In all sorts of ways, having a learning perspective as a parent is the most satisfying and successful way to parent. The closest any of us can get is, “doing the least harm possible”! That is not meant to sound bleak. In fact, when we look at what that means in practice, it just means using the least coercive strategy. 

Parenting with passion promote this parenting approach: in practice, this means using the least coercive effective strategy. You can learn more about this approach from our other blogs, and join our mailing list to get an email notification about future workshops.