A few weeks ago I listened to a radio podcast on 'Overparenting' - basically parents who overschedule their kids and fill every hour up with another dance class or basketball practice or flute tuition and so on. Basically parents trying to give their child every single opportunity in life that they may have missed out on. OK, so the kids wouldn't have a moment to themselves, just to BE, to PLAY, to be kiddy-like....but as I pondered the story, my mind drifted to a different scenario....perhaps I would call it Underparenting.
I see it so often, sadly. A man wheels his boy into the local community park. The boy is let out of the pram. The dad lights up a cigarette. The boy gets upset while in the sandpit. The dad picks him up, plonks him back in his pram again, and off they go. That was 5 minutes in the park. A woman yells at her daughter "I'll belt you one" as the girl struggles with removing her shoes. Apparently she's taking them off the 'wrong way'. The mother re-iterates her threat to 'give her a good belting'. The child, ragged-looking and with a face that yearns for attention, finally manages to remove her shoes...without her mother's help. A mother at playgroup pretends to kick a child who is lying on the floor screaming. She says "I'll give you something to scream about" and then makes a joke about child abuse and that "it doesn't matter coz it's not my child". Two mothers sit at a cafe, while their babies are sucking dummies in their prams. The mothers light up. The babies inhale smoke from not one, but two, cigarettes. This is what I mean by underparenting.
I see it so often, sadly. A man wheels his boy into the local community park. The boy is let out of the pram. The dad lights up a cigarette. The boy gets upset while in the sandpit. The dad picks him up, plonks him back in his pram again, and off they go. That was 5 minutes in the park. A woman yells at her daughter "I'll belt you one" as the girl struggles with removing her shoes. Apparently she's taking them off the 'wrong way'. The mother re-iterates her threat to 'give her a good belting'. The child, ragged-looking and with a face that yearns for attention, finally manages to remove her shoes...without her mother's help. A mother at playgroup pretends to kick a child who is lying on the floor screaming. She says "I'll give you something to scream about" and then makes a joke about child abuse and that "it doesn't matter coz it's not my child". Two mothers sit at a cafe, while their babies are sucking dummies in their prams. The mothers light up. The babies inhale smoke from not one, but two, cigarettes. This is what I mean by underparenting.
Yesterday I read a post by someone on a forum I visit daily. It was about a family that came to visit them, where it became obvious that the parenting skills of the family in question, were really quite poor. Poor perhaps because of a lack of education, of support, of good role models. The lady who wrote the post explained that rather than judge the family or try to correct them or offer advice, she just went about her usual way of parenting her children. The other family were pretty quick to pick up on what she was doing and commented "Oh I never thought of doing it that way". What a positive example for that family - no-one lecturing them, telling them that they were doing things wrong - just leading by example, through their actions foremost, not their words.
This is what I will keep in mind when I am faced with situations of underparenting around me - just go about doing what I do, set a positive example, be a good role model and let my actions speak for themselves.
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