It all makes my head hurt.
Why do we need labels for EVERYTHING??? It's starting to feel like someone is walking around with one of those label maker things and slapping a label on EVERYTHING we do.
Your kid is running and playing and being loud and didn't listen to you THE FIRST time you said to stop, so your kid must have ADD or ADHD BAM have a label. (not to say I don't think ADD/ADHD exist because I do, but I think SOMETIMES it's just slapped on super fast, when all kids are very different and some kids...are just literally BEING KIDS).
Then there is the whole "Crunchy, Silky, Scrunchy" mom thing. Oy vey. What are we talking about? Peanut butter? Women's shaving cream? Hair ties from the 80's and 90's? What is this? Here's your label!
There is the TIGER MOM. I can just imagine a mom wearing some tiger striped yoga pants stalking the roast at the grocery store, and POUNCING on it, to bring her 'kill' home for her kids. Then doing what Tiger mama's in the wild do, sit on their young and lick'em clean, and show'em some tough love. It all makes me giggle a little to picture in my mind. (yes I know what "tiger mom" really means, but it's much more hilarious to imagine my OWN Tiger mom scenario in my head. Look, it's a suburban TIGER!)
I read an article the other day that was going on and on about Generation X. I'm not sure what exactly that group IS, I was born in 84, so I don't know if I fall on the tail end of that or not, but lemme tell ya, the things that article mentioned the "Gen X" group doing to 'mess up their kids and be bad parents' is ridiculous, and totally not stuff we do in our home.
The article said we "love" our kids "too much" and we do "too much" with them.
Sorry, you can't love your kids too much. There's a difference between LOVING your child and enabling and coddling your child.
I spent five years as a Stay at home mom, which to me I was just being a mom, it didn't matter whether I was staying at home or working. I was just a mom, regardless.
When I was home with the kids I played with them on the floor, we did activities together, they would also go play in their rooms by themselves, we'd go outside and explore go on nature walks, do science experiments and just have fun.
I watch my kids closely when they are outside, because I know my kids. I know what they do without close supervision, they are wild and free spirits and would totally take advantage of a situation and be God only knows where then I'd be in a whole new heap of trouble. They get THAT from their father and sisters, who when THEY were growing up were NEVER home they were always taking off and ending up all over creation and at VERY young ages and they got in bad trouble over it, as did their mom, which I have MANY opinions on that, buuuut I'll keep that to myself.
I was also a wanderer. We lived in the country and I learned how to sneak out of the house at three years old, and explore and stuff. I put myself in all kinds scary situations (like almost getting bitten by a copper head when I was 8, because I refused to stay in my yard).
My Mother was a STRICT Mother, she was what you would call an "Authoritarian" it was HER rules or else. That. Was. That. She ruled the house with an iron fist.
I never did anything in school until 5th grade when she allowed me to join band.
It was so boring (not getting to do anything) . I just wanted to play baseball. I wanted to do Girl Scouts. I wanted to try new things. But nope. I didn't get to. I hated that part, and wish my Mother would have let me try more new things. Instead she piled on the chores. Then wondered why I was a hand full and rebelled against doing everything she wanted me to do practically (though I was still a good kid, I never partied or got into trouble as a teenager, I stayed home read books, wrote, drew, played piano and my flute, and had zero life).
Back then it was butt whoopin's if you didn't listen and do what you were asked to do. I've been spanked with my fair share of things! I was ONLY spanked with a belt once, and that was NOT by my Mother, and that NEVER happened again. My Grandma spanked me with a willow branch a time or two, (FYI that super sucks, and the thinner the branch...the worse it is. The worst part is when you have to choose your OWN branch....oh the agony of that one!!). Fly swatters, a brush once, and a wooden spoon. (I was a very sassy kid). I got spanked a lot.
To be fair, my mother TRIED time outs with me. But I dug a whole in the time out corner. I used my little fingers to dig right through the dry wall and destroyed a wall because I was so ticked off at my Mother for putting me in time out.
When you are getting your butt whipped you don't have much time to think about destroying anything. You're just thinking about how you can avoid the next swat, ha, AND thinking about how next time you will make a different choice to NOT do what you did to get spanked in the first place. Time outs...just gave me a chance to plot out my revenge. I was a VERY naughty child when I was young. (my strong willed children get it honestly from BOTH their mom and dad).
THANKFULLY I can say that spankings are NOT a common thing at my house. I'm not 100% against them, though I do NOT agree in using objects to spank your children. IF you are going to spank your kid it should be with an open palm ONLY on their butt. And you do NOT need to use all of your strength to do it, enough to get their attention is proficient. But spankings are a last resort around here.
We prefer to use our Reward Chart (kids get points for good behavior and doing their chores and home work and going to bed on time). Those points, they can cash in at the end of the week and use it to have pizza for supper, or cash it in to make root beer floats on Friday night, or use it to rent out a movie, or spend those points to let a friend spend the night, or use those points for a couple of extra books at story time, etc.
Points left over at the end of the month, can be cashed in for money. Generally they choose to put that left over money in their piggy bank and save up for something they really want (or to at least help pay for it).
My kids have chores. They always have. Since before they could walk. Since they could crawl they've helped clean up their toys, it was a game at our house!
My daughter is 7 and a half years old, and she helps do dishes (plastic plates, spoons, plastic cups and plastic bowls). She can also run the vacuum, and sweep, and she can wipe off the table and set it for meals, and clear the table after meals. She helps fold laundry and helps put it away (I say help because I don't make her do it all by herself). And she cleans her room. She helps put laundry in the washer and helps put it in the dryer too.
My sons are 6 and they can run the vacuum, and sweep. They help dry and rinse dishes (this year they'll be learning to wash too). They clean their rooms, and pick up their dirty laundry, as well as assisting with the washing and drying.
They get to help pick out supper, and depending on what they choose they get various levels of chances to help cook the meals as well.
When we mow the yard, they are out there picking up any trash that may have blown into our yard, or sticks or anything else that might tear up the mower. They also help move the lawn furniture and lawn toys out of the way so their Dad or I can mow. The other day Circus Son #1 got to help push the mower (I'll admit I was on the edge of my seat for that one, but he had so much fun and his Daddy was right there helping hold the mower and keeping him safe, so I let him 'help' his Daddy mow).
By the time I was 8 years old I was mowing a HUGE hilly hard with a push mower, BY MYSELF with no one outside with me helping or watching me. Do you know how many times I almost lost toes or a foot because I slipped on a hill??? I'm surprised I survived honestly. Not sure what my Mother was thinking.
In the fall we work together as a family to all help rake up leaves.
We love the 15min clean thing. We make it a race at our house. We do it mainly on Saturday's because that's my day off and I don't want to spend it all CLEANING, so we do 15min of cleaning TOGETHER as a FAMILY and we all clean in one or two rooms depending on what needs to be done. We all choose something to clean, and I set a timer for 15min and we go to work cleaning like crazy (we make it into a race to see who can get it done first, and the best). When we're done we do something fun. Like go outside to play for an hour, or read a book or three, or watch a cartoon or movie together. Later, we'll do another 15min clean in another area. It works, and we have fun!
I don't need a label to tell me how to parent my kids. I don't care if I'm silky, or crunchy, or scrunchy or whatever all of those other parenting terms and labels are. It doesn't matter to me. I've done everything from being a stay at home mom, to being a working mom, to a working at home mom, I've been a coach mom, a soccer mom, a TWIN mom, a cancer mom, a seizure mom, a mom to a daughter, a mom to sons, a bossy mom (as my daughter often calls me), I've been a breast feeding mom, a pumping mom, a bottle feeding formula mom, a make your own baby food mom too. I've been a baby wearing mom too, and a co sleeping mom.
I've just done what I felt was best for my kids, for our family. Back when my daughter was born I guess I thought the labels were kind of nice. That it some how gave me a sense of "togetherness" with other moms, a feeling that I 'belonged' (belonged where? In a looney bin? I dunno). I quickly realized it's all a JOKE. Those moms in those "groups/labels" no more get along with each other than they do any other mom in another group. Mommy wars ALL THE WAY AROUND. Hate that person, hate this person, gossip on that person, make fun of them, judge them for what they do, etc etc. Someone does it differently than YOU they are wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And you need to point it out to the world. I guess as moms we're sometimes just looking for validation that we AREN'T messing up our kids, because face it...being in charge of something so tiny and fragile and knowing that it fully depends on YOU and that everything you do, every choice you make, effects your child....it's terrifying. You just KNOW that whatever they do as adults, will come back on YOU as the parent and you'll be asking yourself "What did I do wrong??" So you just want to do everything as right as you can.
Every mom thinks they are the only ones that are right when it comes to raising their children.
I had to chuckle at the article I read the other day about how GenX was raising kids all wrong. My only thought? Well...the group before us RAISED us...soooo apparently THEY didn't do such a hot job if we all apparently suck at parenting now in Gen X. (my Mother was born in 59', and her mom was born in like 30 something or another). If OUR parents were supposed to be so awesome and so much better than us....what went wrong that we all apparently suck as parents TODAY?
The internet. I blame the internet (I'm only half way joking there ya'll). Our parents didn't have the internet to raise us (we didn't get a home computer until I was 14 years old and it was the sloooow dial up crap that sucked so it was hardly ever used). At that point, there is no way my Mother new anything about the computer to 'research' anything or ask other moms opinions, or find out what the latest 'trend' was in parenting. I don't even know if they HAD parenting magazines (other than the Highlights magazine) when I was a small child/teenager. The only parenting advice my MOTHER got was from HER mom, from her friends and our neighbors, and from the little old ladies in our church who had been there done that multiple times over.
My Mother is close to sixty and is helping my little sister with her two boys, and my Mother cannot BELIEVE some of the things that my sister and I talk about when it comes to 'parenting' and the 'styles' of parenting.
The term style makes me think of clothing. Do this parenting trend it's what is suddenly popular on the MOM RUNWAY! Hurry run to Target and get this latest and greatest parenting trend. Label yourself as THIS or THAT mom. 6 months down the road? We are all changing our course of parenting because suddenly it isn't "in" anymore and now we have to try something ELSE with our kids or some Child Psychologist on TV says our kids will grow up to be murders, rapists, and serial killers and we will have ruined our kids for life IF we don't follow this latest parenting trend.
It's a lot to keep up with.
Personally, I think continually changing how you parent in your home is more damaging than anything else. That doesn't give very good consistency. It also doesn't give a child enough time to adapt to your new way of parenting. I'm not saying you shouldn't re-evaluate your parenting style and see if there is something you want to work on changing (like me, I'm a yeller, God help me, I never wanted to be a yeller or a spanker, but I am a yeller and I hate it! My Mother was a yeller, my Grandma was a yeller and I bet my Great Grandmother was a yeller too) So yes I do work at finding new ways to change that, so that isn't a bad thing to want to change something you are doing that YOU personally aren't comfortable with.
My husband and I, the first thing we did when we found out we were pregnant, we laid down some parenting RULES. A set of goals and things we wanted to keep in mind as we parented our children. (My #1 thing was I didn't want to be a yeller...obviously...I failed at that one!!). My husband didn't want our kids to have the life HE had as a child, and he has done an amazing job of being a fantastic father and giving them the life he NEVER had growing up. Two parents raising them, not foster homes or family raising them. WE raise our own children. We care for them, not a sitter or day care. (Not that we hate Day Care we just didn't want to use Day Care that was our choice, I think Day Care can be a good thing it just wasn't what we wanted for our children and some days back when they were younger I found myself kicking myself in the arse for NOT thinking Day Care was an excellent idea, so yeh, Karma isn't always nice ok?)
Some parents want their kids to go to school, and then play play play like kids should. Other parents want their kids to worry about school AND extra curricular activities, and forget to have time for 'fun' and play.
We try to balance the act.
It's helpful when you don't have tons of money to put into all the activities your kids would LOVE to do, because then it's so much easier to say no to them. It also helps to split the activities up so it is a little cheaper, rather than doing ALL the things at the SAME time, try them one at a time.
Above and Below: Fun family time during the 4th of July festivities at our local park! We had so much fun last year and can't wait to do it again this year.
Below: Our family vacation last year when we went to a family reunion, a zoo and stopped and visited with other family along the way. The kids had soo much fun jumping on their cousins trampoline.
Below: What's more fun than sticking your head in a hippo's mouth at the zoo? When the hippo's head spits water at you!
I am teaching my children to play piano since I've played since I was 12. IF my daughter chooses to play flute I can help her with that, I still have my flute and sheet music too. I can help my sons should they ever choose to join band. My kids are in to sports right now, and currently they are playing soccer and I'm cool with that. There won't be any summer sports for us this year though it wasn't in the financial basket. Though I was hoping to do swim lessons this summer. This summer we're focusing on home schooling (and not in the strict fashion of school either, I guess it falls more under the label of 'unschooling') Making it fun for them so they don't realize I'm secretly helping them get ahead for the next school year (we're also doing summer school for a couple of weeks) and they are signed up for a fun program at the public library but not sure if they will get to attend much of it due to summer school).
Above and below: Tball last year with my kids...what an adventure that was, but it was a great learning experience for us all! Who knew, organized sports could be so interesting.
Below: I let my daughter be who she is. If that means dressing pink and girly go for it. Be you, be comfortable. If she wants to play with dinosaurs and lego's and hot wheels, go for it kid! That all goes for her brothers too. They can play with Barbie's and dress up clothes and whatever else.
We make sure there is ONE day a week (mostly more) of FAMILY time. We always eat supper together as a family, and in the summer usually eat all three meals together, but I'm working now so I will miss lunch, and my husband will miss supper. But we'll make it all work.
I have plenty of fun summer things planned out to do in our own back yard as a FAMILY. We're excited for that!
Above and Below: To us, family is more important than any label we could put on ourselves. I don't care what our 'style' is. I just want my kids to remember how much we loved them and how much fun we had, and that we always did our best for them, whether it's having a squirt gun fight in the back yard, or swimming at the lake, or going on a hike through a park on a trail.
We like to keep our schedule flexible, so sometimes we CAN do spontaneous and fun things. Like pack up at a moments notice and go to the lake and BBQ and swim and hike and explore. If we were loaded with activities we couldn't do that.
We value time spent together, over money spent on each other and activities.
Above: We probably eat too many freezie pops during the summer, but it's a fun summer treat!
I don't really care to be labeled anything other than the proud Mommy of my three amazing kids. I'm so much more than that too. I'm a wife, a sister, a daughter, an aunt, a cousin, a friend, a BEST friend, a volunteer, and so much more.
There's a little bit of all parenting 'styles' that work for our family. We end up using a little bit of that idea, and little bit of this idea and meshing it all together without even knowing we were doing that, and it just works (for us).
I may not agree with another parents choice when it comes to raising their kids, but at the end of the day if their child is healthy, safe, and loved then who am I to judge? I don't have that right to tell them how to parent their child. The other fact remains, it's not MY Child. I have MY children to make decisions for, not everyone else's.
Ha, TRUST ME I'm surrounded by moms who I do NOT agree with quite often on their parenting ideas. I just realize that it's not something I would choose to do with MY OWN family, and that's ok. It's not so much that I think it's bad for THEIR family, it's just a reaction that I would NOT choose to do that (or so I would like to think, however if I were in their exact situation, would I be so inclined to make a different decision or the same one??)
I just think it's hard to put a label on Mommyhood. We're all so different. We don't fall under designer parenting concepts, and neither do our children. I think honestly we're all a bit of 'here and there' when it comes to parenting, even the sanctimommies who swear they do it right all the time, every day, with every kid. It's ok ladies, I gotchya. I understand.
Just love your kids. Just keep them as healthy and safe as you can, but I cannot express to you enough how much you should just love them. Give them hugs and kisses and high fives and snuggles, and pat them on the back, hold them when they cry. That's things all kinds need...right? No matter your parenting' style'. I just think that the more we label our selves as parents we are just putting more distance between each other as moms. That the 'mom wars' as they love to call them, will never ever go away (though I'm sure they've always been there).
I mean, I've said it before and I'll say it again...we've all got the same jobs as moms (and dads!!) Raise your kids, and keep them alive. That is a top goal, correct? I mean we spend our entire pregnancies praying we don't miscarry and at the littlest sign of trouble we panic and run to our OB because we're afraid something is wrong with our child. The second they are born we want to hear that first big scream and cry to make sure they are breathing, and find out if they have all fingers and toes and are healthy. We spend the first several months of their lives making sure they are still breathing in the middle of the night and not suffocating on something, or dying from SIDS. As toddlers we're terrified they'll swallow something, or stick something in a light socket, or go into on coming traffic, or fall down stairs, or have a dresser or TV fall on them. We're afraid of them eating a chemical and dying etc etc. We're afraid of our children not being restrained in a car seat properly to keep them alive in a car accident, we're afraid of strangers (or family) stealing or hurting our children. We cry when we hear of other parents or other twisted people harming a child in anyway. So yes, I think it's safe to say that the #1 goal ALL moms share...is the safety of our children. No matter the 'label' you choose to put on yourself AS a mom.
I've always LOVED this video by Similac it says, essentially...exactly what I'm saying here. Please give it a watch if you haven't already! (*please note I have no affiliation with the Similac company just loved their videos, in fact when we DID use formula, it was a different brand).
The Mother Hood Video (by Similac)
Also check out their I Accept You video (by Similac)
Now, if only more moms were REALLY in to accepting other moms. Those moms are out there, it's just hard sometimes, to find them. Keep looking they are there. Just remember, they don't have to necessarily AGREE with all your parenting choices, to accept you. They just realize it's not something that would work for their family. That does NOT mean they should tear you down over it though.
Mom Circus
Happy Mommying.
