Lately, I have noticed that my interactions with the children have been pretty negatively charged. I have felt that I am nagging over all the things that seem important to me and that I feel should be important to them. Those areas are (not in order of importance): Chores, music practicing, and schoolwork. What is so difficult for me is that I feel that all of these things are so important for our children and for their success and happiness. I want to save them the pain of consequences. In other words, I feel like if I don’t nag them to do their homework, or if I allow them to procrastinate, or not prepare for their tests, then they will not go to a good university, and they will be unemployed for the rest of their lives! Or if I don’t nag them to prepare for their music lessons they will waste their talents, and feel that awful feeling of guilt you get when you show up at yet another lesson unprepared. (I remember that feeling well!) Or they will quit playing their instruments altogether.
I guess it is pretty natural for a parent to want to save their children from pain and failure. But am I doing them any favors? Especially if in trying to shield them from those things I am sacrificing good relationships with my children for relationships of contention and anger. So what did we do? I find that everything gets easier when I enlist Grant’s help. He and I started discussing my frustrations tonight and then Sam and Lizzie joined us and we had an amazing talk where we were all brainstorming about how we can make things better. We listened to the children and they listened to us. We decided that it was time to let them experience natural consequences. I was going to back away from nagging over school work. Thankfully, the children are all good students (some are even GREAT students), but just need a little experience in figuring out how to use their time better. If our children are not prepared then they will get the bad grade, but it will no longer be my responsibility to save them from that. I am firing myself from the job of school nag and homework enforcer! And if they don’t have good enough grades to get into BYU (their dream school and mine) then I will be there to commiserate and console, since I was once there myself! (I ended up having to go to a Jr. college for 1 1/2 years in order to get the grades I needed to be accepted by BYU. It was a very sobering reality check the day I got that rejection letter!)
Regarding their music lessons I needed to really be honest with myself. Yes, I want them to not waste their talents. Yes, I didn’t want them to feel the failure of not being prepared. Yes, I didn’t want them to quit and yes, I wanted them to feel the joy of producing beautiful music…but I think there was more to my motives in driving them to practice. I am so invested in their music education because I have accepted the idea (I blame/thank the Suzuki method!) that if they fail, I fail. It is not an idea that “they” didn’t practice but that “we” didn’t practice. I have already had enough failure in my own music education! I took many music lessons and was never prepared and never really advanced in my learning. So, what we decided for the older kids is that they need to make a weekly goal (Lizzie’s is to practice 3 1/2 hours of good, meaningful practicing and Sam’s is 4 hours and 15 minutes). If they don’t meet their weekly goal they will be grounded from friends until the next lesson for which they are prepared. Hopefully this will take me out of the roll of Practice Nag.
We also adjusted bed time. Our big kids have always had an 8 pm bed time (in theory, not so much in practice) and we let them read for as long as they want as long as they don’t get out of bed or if their behavior isn’t affected by lack of sleep. However, we decided that they can push bedtime back to 9 pm but they need to have lights out at 10. This weekend Sam and Lizzie stayed up on Friday night with their cousins until 1 am and then last night they were up again until 1 am trying to get homework done before the Sabbath (We try to observe the Sabbath by not doing homework). Sam was so exhausted all day that he put himself to bed at 7 tonight!
In our discussion the most important thing we decided to do was to go back to our 6 am scripture study habit. It was a great way to start the day but we got lazy and wanted to sleep in more. I saw a marked improvement in the feeling of peace in our home when we were consistently studying the scriptures together in the morning.
I feel hope in the changes we have made. We have very few things that ever really fix problems long term or are perfect systems, but we keep trying nonetheless. Lizzie asked me if compared to other mothers was I a patient mother or impatient one? I wish I had said that comparing is always an unsatisfactory, and unproductive endeavor, but I answered, “I’m sure that there are many mothers out there who are more patient than me, and I’m sure there are many who are less. You will never know what kind of mother I am until you are a mother yourself.” (Before I had children I thought I would be the best mother in the world. When I became one, I realized that my mother was the best one in the world!)
I am always amazed at how much parenting is about faith. Faith that our children will make good decisions. Faith that if they don’t it will all turn out in the end through the grace of God. Faith in our own abilities as a parent. Faith that despite our weakness we are meant to be the parents of the children who are ours. Faith that the grace of God applies to us when we mess up as parents! What a glorious, difficult, emotional, perfect journey parenthood is.
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