The World’s Strictest Parents – Atlanta, Georgia (USA)
Key 6 • Learn Together As You Go
Everything is in a constant process of discovery and creating. Life is intent on finding what works, not what’s “right.”
– Margaret Wheatley
Key Concepts
• Whatever comes up, you can handle it.
• You and your kids can co-operate to make decisions and solve problems.
• There are lots of ways to meet needs.
• You can celebrate what works.
• You can learn from what doesn’t work.
Have you found yourself finally getting a foothold in the issues and challenges of parenting an infant just when your darling baby outgrows midnight feedings, diapers, and midmorning naps and you’re suddenly faced with the challenges of raising a toddler? Your hard-won, new skill set for taking care of a baby has been outdated in only a few months. In a few months more, your toddler morphs into a four-year-old and you’re immersed in learning a new set of skills for a new set of challenges. Each stage of your child’s development, right up through adolescence (and beyond), requires you to learn new habits, create new structures, and develop new strategies to keep him or her learning, growing, and thriving. And it doesn’t necessarily get easier the more children you have. Kids grow so fast that parents can’t practice most of the new techniques they’re learning long enough to master them, and the time between the toddler hoods of the first- and second-born is long enough for parents to forget everything they thought they knew.
When kids are changing thoroughly and constantly, it’s hard to feel confident that you’re up to the challenge and that what you want to be passing along to them is being transmitted or received. To be successful in handling such constant change with confidence rather than self-recrimination and doubt, (1) learn to learn as you go, and (2) co-operate with your kids to make decisions and solve problems.
• Whatever Comes Up, You Can Handle It
It is impossible for parents to plan for every stage of a child’s development, to anticipate every change and be ready for it. So learning as you go not only makes sense, it seems to be required if you are going to keep pace with your child’s growth. Learning as you go means you are learning to have faith that you can handle whatever comes up and to trust that things will work out. Learning as you go is based on the understanding that you are a learner about life in the same way that your kids are. It is supported by the realization that there are many ways to do things. It is based on the fact that we have a lot of choices, and if one way we’ve chosen to do something doesn’t work, we are free to choose another and another. Learning as you go implies being awake, noticing little things, and being open and receptive rather than judgmental.
Learning as you go encourages you to let go of rigid thoughts such as there is only one right way to do things, people should do certain things, or somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. Learning as you go is based, instead, on a belief that there are no failures-just new sets of circumstances to deal with.
• You and Your Kids Can Co-operate to
Make Decisions and Solve Problems
Learning together, as you go, is based on the fact that you and your kids can be great partners for planning, decision making, and problem solving about things that affect their daily lives. Your kids are full of great ideas and love to share them. They are playful, fun, zany, open, interactive, outside-the-box thinkers. They want to contribute and to have a hand in deciding how their household operates. Learning together means that you trust that two heads are better than one because the outcome you get has the most potential to be satisfying for everyone. One of the challenges of co-operating to solve problems is that it requires you to let go of the impulse to manage and control everything that affects your kids’ lives. Letting go becomes easier when you realize that there are more strategies for solving problems than there are problems-more ways to meet needs than there are needs. When you co-investigate solutions, structures, and strategies with kids, your options and choices are limited only by your collective understanding of the situation at hand, your experiences, and your creative imaginations. It’s a more playful and open-ended way to approach not just problems and concerns but every aspect of raising children. The spirit of it is, Let’s look at this situation together, see what everyone needs from it, and put our heads together to see how to address everyone’s needs. (Please remember that most of what kids ask for, such as video games, soda, or brand-name sneakers, is not needs but strategies for meeting needs.
Co-investigating and co-creating with kid’s means taking risks and letting go of lots of shoulds. Your kids might suggest an idea for getting the dishes done: every member of the family washes his or her own plate, glass, and silverware, and two people rotate doing the pots and pans. It is a plan they are excited about; however, it doesn’t match the way you think dishes should be done. Or what if your kids suggest sleeping in cotton sleeping bags (because the sheets and blankets get too messy and are too big and difficult to straighten out every day, they say) and this doesn’t match your picture of what a bed should be. Are you willing to move outside of your comfort zone in order to experience the willing participation of your kids?
We encourage you to provide your kids with many opportunities to develop the confidence and skills to co-operate and find strategies that meet everyone’s needs. To practice skills and build on successes, begin with some relatively simple activities that your family can decide on together:
- Planning how to spend the morning together
- Planning what order to do afternoon errands planning a meal
- Planning a party
- Celebrating a holiday
Explore for Yourself
In what areas do you and your children co-operate?
In what areas can you imagine more co-operations?
How do you feel when you imagine that level of co-operation?
We never do anything wrong. We never have. We never will. We do things we wouldn’t have done if we knew then what we are learning now.
-Marshall B. Rosenberg
There Are Lots of Ways to Meet Needs
Meeting needs is the number one activity of life. Do you want this ongoing activity to be a chore or a pleasure? Whether fulfilling needs is a chore or a pleasure depends to a great extent on whether the world seems rich with an abundance of choices or bleak with a scarcity of them.
Whether it is apparent to you at this moment or not, most of you who are reading this book live in a world of abundance. For every need you have, there are many ways or strategies to fulfill it. Painting, sculpting, dancing, and singing are different ways to meet a need for creative expression. Reading, watching movies, listening to tapes, talking with others, or thinking quietly are ways to meet a need for learning. To meet needs for contributing to daily life at home, you can wash dishes, sweep the floor, prepare a meal, make a centerpiece for the table, or take out the trash. If it is fun you want, there are many ways to meet that need, as well.
Explore for Yourself
Select one need and identify several different ways you have found to satisfy that need. If you take the time to ponder these lists (or write them down), you may discover which ways have worked the best. You may also discover more ways you could try.
