Oh, I’m full of advice:
Yes, housework will ALWAYS wait for you! My kids are grown now, but one piece of advice I am glad I took was to value their childhood more than the housecleaning. After all, when they reach their teens and don’t want to admit that you even exist, or when they are independent and on their own, you want more to remember than having had a clean house for 20 years.
Read to children even before they understand what it’s about. It is not only good for their mental development, it’s good for everyone’s emotional development too, to have that quiet time together sitting close and enjoying a story.
Say what you mean and mean what you say (as much as possible). If a child asks for something and you say “no,” and he/she starts to whine or have a tantrum, the response must be ABSOLUTELY no. Otherwise you are rewarding the whining or the tantrum. I’ve seen parents who will say, “It’s time for bed right now!” for an hour or two. It’s no surprise that the kids never took any direction seriously. Or the ones who give in to the candy or whatever after 15 minutes of obnoxious behavior just to shut the youngster up. So they just taught that if you engage in enough obnoxious behavior, you can have anything you want. My reaction to the crying or whatever was to tell the child, “Well, up until now you had a chance I might change my mind later, or you might have gotten that tomorrow or after dinner, but since you are behaving badly you will definitely not get that at all.” And I made sure I followed through.
Don’t put a child in a situation that’s more than she is able to handle. My younger was physically unable to sit still and be quiet as a pre-schooler. Not bad, just very active and talkative. It was impossible to take her places like restaurants. Until she had learned how to control her restlessness and to use a soft voice when necessary, we simply didn’t go to restaurants with her. We didn’t punish her, but we just said that in restaurants you have to act in a certain way, and that when she was able to do so, she could come along, too.
Of course, we all will make mistakes, some worse than others. Don’t try to be the perfect mom/dad. You can’t. If you try, you will only make things worse by stressing out yourself and your family. The WORST holiday we ever had was when I tried to do all the stuff you’re “supposed” to do – the decorations, the gingerbread men, the perfect dinner, the perfectly-wrapped presents, visit both sets of grandparents, etc. By Christmas afternoon we were all so frazzled that those of the female persuasion were in tears and poor Daddy was irritated beyond belief.
Another mistake I made was along the same lines of naively making assumptions about my children’s interests and abilities. I think there was a lot of projection going on, that I was unaware of until much later. Sometimes I was too harsh and too quick to say “no.” Sometimes I imposed standards that, on later reflection, were based merely on what my own parents’ standards were without examining those standards more realistically. As an example: My older daughter wanted to go to the local vocational school. I assumed that the academic standards would be entirely too low, and that the class of person she would associate with would not be good enough. Being an eager-to-please person, she argued a bit, but then gave up. My younger daughter was more persistent and kept bringing me more and more information about the exact program she wanted. When I acquiesced, and she was in that school, she was actually better off. She told me that the students in the vo-tech school were more serious and hard-working because they all had specific goals and objectives they had chosen, whereas a large number of those in the mainstream school were just kind of drifting aimlessly, with a goal of getting by with as little work as possible. What an eye-opener that was!
I can think of a ton of other major and minor errors I made. One additional concept I would offer is not to take yourself too seriously or judge yourself too harshly. Parenting is the only job (and it is hard work) I can think of that is done ENTIRELY by amateurs. You will make a ton of mistakes. Some of them you will think you have learned from, but it is too late, since if you have a subsequent child, or try to offer your little lessons to some other parent, it may be irrelevant. Each new child is a completely new project, with different requirements, assets and liabilities. Just love them and do the best you can with the resources you have at your disposal, and accept both your own and the child’s imperfections.
