It’s been said, “A hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in or the kind of car I drove….but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.” On the eve of our son’s graduation from high school, I reflect on my years as a parent - those short eighteen years that seem to have gone by in the blink of an eye - the most important job I’ve ever done. It doesn’t matter if we’ve never had biological children or whether we’ve been mentors, teachers, counselors, aunts, uncles or friends. We’ve all had opportunities to make a difference in a younger person’s life. I’ve had to be honest about how I was parented and decide consciously if I would continue what I received just because, “It’s always been that way.” I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard lines like that in my career as a counselor. We justify our behavior because that’s how our families have done things for generations. It’s difficult because parenting is one of the most unconscious things we do unless we elevate our awareness and ask ourselves, is this working? We learn to parent from how we were parented. It comes through our lower back and out of our gut. We need a license to drive. To be a biological mother or father, we just have to birth a child.

Because child-rearing has been passed down through our families for generations, we may be the first to do something different. There’s so much information available now that wasn’t accessible for my parents in the 1950’s. We now know how important it is to separate the deed from the doer. “I love you, but I don’t like your behavior.” We know that “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” is a lie and that hitting and spanking only teaches children to hate and fear their parents. Time out and consequences for behavior teaches children to look at what they’ve done and decide how they could do things differently the next time. Using these parenting techniques feels very uncomfortable and unfamiliar when we first begin because they’re foreign, it’s uncharted territory. I remember a phone call with my mother as she overheard me asking my two year old if he wanted to wear his sneakers or his sandals. My mother said, “You don’t give a two year old a choice what to wear, you dress them.” I realized that was probably why at 25 years old with two master’s degrees, I had a hard time knowing what was true for me and making my own decisions.

People tell my husband and me that we’ve done a great job raising our son. I accept the compliment because I know we’ve parented him differently than we were parented. I remember feeling like my parents had popped out of the womb as parents. They’d shared very little about the struggles they had as adolescents when I was a teenager and needed to hear something I could relate to rather than a lecture or demand. I ignored their “Just say no,” when I observed them “partying” with their friends. The “Do as I say, not as I do,” rule only teaches children to tune their parents out. Looking at ourselves means it’s not too late to have a happy childhood or to provide a better childhood for the generations of children to come. As social service programs have their budgets cut, it’s our responsibility to do what we can to be positive mentors to children of all ages who need help. It’s picking up that thousand pound phone and calling the abuse hot line when we know a child is being neglected or abused. It’s taking that parenting class that we don’t think we have time for. It’s stepping out of our comfort zones and truly knowing that any positive influence we can provide for a child can and will make a difference.  

Please write to Dr. Sandy Islands at sandyislands@hawaii.rr.com  and feel free to browse previous articles at www.sandyislands.com under publications.