GOOD ENOUGH MOTHERING

I saw a recent Facebook post by a young mother. It was an article talking about how hard it is to parent these days. The culture offers us minute by minute advice on how to raise strong, healthy, creative, sensitive, thoughtful, intelligent, athletic, well-rounded children. The stress can be overwhelming and the guilt can be debilitating.

When I read the article I was reminded of the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott who studied child development. He believed that central to the health of a child is the way she is held.  The mother’s holding is important in that it creates a warm and safe place in which the child might navigate the changes in her life. He calls this “good enough mothering.”

Jacqueline J. Lewis interprets Winnicott this way: “[A] mother creates a holding environment for the child as she cradles him in her arms and creates a safe place for him to grow. This holding environment is increased with time and space; it becomes a cradle, a playpen, the next room, and eventually the weekly phone call between a parent and an adult child. Thus the arms-around feeling of the holding environment becomes the transitional space in which a child develops; transitional space is also the space for adult living, learning and playing. It is the space in which art, creativity and religious experience occur.” (The Power of Stories)

There are many things that our culture offers our children and so many of the young parents I know work really hard to make these available to their off-spring. But, I sometimes wonder if the stability of a holding space isn’t the most important. Parents, whether men or women, create a container to help children hold their energy and spirit so that they can work out how to live in the family, the neighborhood and the society. Children, regardless of our ages, need people who can help us hold what is sometimes the chaotic emotions of growing and changing.

So parents, hold on and stay present. Our children need the “arms-around” feeling that can help them discover their own way, their own strength and their own direction.

BETWEEN PARENT AND TEENAGER

One of the joys of life is the opportunity to learn from others.

Since I wrote "Lose, Love, Live" I have had numerous opportunities to do workshops on grief and loss.  One workshop resulted in an insight that had never occurred to me.

Mark, a youth minister who was in the group listened to me talk about how people respond when they experience a loss. I talked of how people often feel scared when they are losing something that really matters. Anger is generally present in those times.  Anger is normal because anger is a physical response to threat. When we feel threatened the body dispenses adrenaline in our system to give us energy to fight what threatens us, flee from it, or freeze so that the threat might not notice us.  When we lose something that helps us know who we are, we are threatened and get angry.

After the workshop Mark came up to me and said, "This explains the conflict that I deal with all the time when I work with youth and their parents.  At the same time teenagers are reaching for their independence, they are also losing the security and safety of dependence.  Parents, while encouraging independence, are losing the relationship they had with children who were more under their control. That is why there is so much anger."

Mark's observation is important.  Parents and teenagers alike are losing life the way they knew it.  As changes happen, no one is totally confident on how life will turn out. While there is much to celebrate in the new place that both the parent and the teenager occupy, there is much to fear.  That fear results in feeling threatened and thus in feeling anger.

Since this is one of the dynamics between parents and teenagers, knowing that each is dealing with loss can help. Each can listen to the other and help the other explore what is so frightening about these changes. Each can explore what they are afraid they will lose and try to determine if there are grounds for that fear. Some losses may not occur. For example, the normal distancing that happens as a young person becomes independent does not necessarily mean that the relationship will disappear.

When you feel anger rising in your relationships, ask yourself, "What am I afraid I am going to lose?"  It might help you understand and navigate the turbulent waters of parenting. 

YOU MATTER

I am a parent of three children.  Adults now. It has been a long time since I had young children at home but I suspect that children still can be both delightful and demonic.  They can bring joy and chaos. And and that may be one of the gifts of their presence. They tap the deep diversity of the human spirit and thus, enrich our lives.

I read something today that I thought might speak to an important part of parenting.  Yesterday I watched the Indianapolis Colts come from 28 points down to beat the Kansas City Chiefs 45-44.  Sports writers couldn't say enough about it. People commenting from Indianapolis and Kansas City were initially speechless.

In analyzing the game, some Colts players were talking about how poorly they played the first half, digging themselves a 28 point hole to get out of. One of the players said, "We weren't trusting each other.  We had to depend on everyone to do their job."

Just as a good football team needs to trust each other to do his job, family life is more dependable when "everyone does his/her job".  I remember as a child that we each had "chores."  Many of my memories of family conflicts were around our not doing our chores or not doing them well enough.  I am sure one of my parents thought more than once, "It would be  easier to do it myself."

And as a child, I didn't like having responsibility.  But, now I understand that those jobs or chores were ways in which my parents taught me that I mattered.  I mattered to the family system  I was important to the social fabric of my family life. I made a contribution to the lives of others. Things go better when each of us does his/her job.

This is not a bad thing to know.  We matter.  It matters to the family team that each does his/her job. We know we matter when what we do contributes to the well-being of the whole.  For a child to know this is a wonderful gift.