Parenthood Isn't a Performance Evaluation
Let's put our gold stars away and remember that everyday life has a lot of what we need
These days, one can find oodles of guidance on how to develop or improve your child’s skills.
These recommendations range from things you can facilitate at home to enrolling them in classes and activities in the community. If you spend enough time reading parenting books, blogs, newsletters (ahem), scrolling social media, and listening to podcasts, you could fill every hour of the day “developing” your child. Developing into what exactly is a good question.
The best of intentions
Let’s get this out of the way. All this is done with good intentions. We want to equip our children and prepare them for their lives ahead. And all children at some point need some intentional skill-building opportunities. Those experiences will take different forms at home, school, and in the community depending on a child’s unique needs. However, in our modern parenting space, there is a strong focus on purposeful actions parents can take to prepare their child for the world and it can be never-ending. With so much time and energy spent getting your child equipped to live, you may just miss out on appreciating them as they are now. This future focus with the lists of tasks, scripted conversations, extracurricular activities, and planned teachable moments can make parenthood less joyful and feel more like a performance evaluation.
Did you adequately address fine motor skills development this quarter? Please provide evidence of the activities you completed to address this skill.
Did you go above and beyond teaching robust emotion regulation skills in the last 3 months? Please provide a detailed anecdote of this key area of development.
Have you read an adequate amount of time to your child with enriching texts to promote lifelong literacy this season? Please list the texts you have covered.
We know a lot, but let’s not forget it’s complicated
This is not individual parents’ doing, but a whole lot of factors working together. You can look to culture, media environment, science communication, and other influences near and far. This highlights one of the challenges in how we apply the knowledge we have acquired through child development research. In our quest to understand the mysteries of how humans feel, think, and learn, we have learned a lot (but there is still much we don’t know). We then translate this knowledge into doing. Which is not a bad thing per se, but when it becomes isolated from the big picture, parenthood becomes a checklist of tasks, not a rich, complex experience centered within a relationship. I recall reading a parenting book many years ago that prescribed daily amounts of time a parent should focus on different areas of skill development. About halfway through the book, I realized the author could not have possibly added up all these timed activities. If you were to earnestly attempt to practice all these skills in the way presented, it would easily exceed the hours of the day. It would also eliminate any spontaneous living. It didn’t seem to be a sustainable (or fun) way to live.
Can everyday life be enough?
At times, you need to do directed activities to support specific skills. For instance, swim lessons, speech therapy, or tutoring. But ordinary everyday life has so many opportunities to support your child (and you), and no specific interventions are needed. I share the below examples not as a way to optimize your time or habit stack your day. Let’s go to the grocery store and work on executive functioning! No, this is not the point. I share this as a way to reduce the pressure and point out that even if you feel you are not doing enough, sometimes living is just what is needed.
Below are three examples of everyday living that also happens to be rich with life skills.
Running errands
When my kids were young, it became intolerable to grocery shop. We had the privilege to choose to switch to ordering online, and that was a good fit for our family at the time. Now that my kids are older, there are benefits to going to stores when it’s possible. Kids benefit from learning how to talk an employee in a store, ask a question, evaluate two products as to whether they are which is what you need, navigate how to pay for something, wait in a line, manage disappointment when a product isn’t in stock…and the list goes on. There are many executive functioning, emotion regulation, and social skills layered in these experiences. And the thing is, you don’t need to manufacture a scenario—take them along on errands and you will encounter these experiences.
I really, really want to emphasize something here—don’t torture yourself because you think you should bring kids on errands who are not developmentally ready to navigate public spaces, or when you do not have the mental capacity to do this. The point of today’s post is about not forcing things. If this doesn’t work for your family, you can find other ways. I have zero regrets about the period that we skipped going into stores as much as possible with a pack of young kids.
Related reading:
Building a piece of furniture
My son and I recently built a bookshelf for our living room. All his Lego building came in handy here. The instruction manual for the bookshelf made sense to him because he had done so many Lego builds. Kids doing kid things, like play, are the building blocks for later skills. But we never gave him Legos because we thought it would benefit him in building furniture. Play is important for the now and the future. And now my son has experienced the Ikea effect.
Picking out gifts for other people
I love to ask this question to my kids as we approach a gift-giving opportunity, “What should we get?” Their answers can surprise me. Sometimes they are spot on, sometimes they are over the top, and sometimes they are exactly what we got last year. This is about perspective-taking and planning, and even some financial literacy, when a budget is established. Depending on who you are gifting to, there might be some managing jealousy or frustration, too. Let’s also throw in the teaching kids about the importance of ritual and celebration into the mix.
Take some stuff off your to-do list
We can live, and they can learn. This is really just a friendly reminder that if you take a step back and reflect on your day to day, you may find that all that development is happening all around you. These particular examples may not fit with your family’s experience, but I think everyone can do with a little less pressure around crafting crucial experiences for your child and a little more presence in everyday life.
Subscribe to A Wonderful Mess if you want more for your parenthood than performance evaluations. Writing about doing a little less when the world tells you to do more.
One of the most memorable moments of parenting was when my 2 year old helped me assemble some chairs. It was just so amazing to see her focused and trying to mimic what I was doing. It just makes you realize these kids are going to learn no matter what you do (or don’t)!
The “War and Peace” image caption made me laugh. Thank you for having a spirit of humor to help parents slow down. I am really grateful for my friend who homeschools two boys, who provides me with a different perspective outside of social media, which I think pushes this hustle parenting.
She helps me realize that the school my daughter is in is enough. Reading and playing to her at night is enough. Embracing these every day opportunities in cooking, cleaning, etc IS ENOUGH.