Tying it all together

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”

~Martin Luther King Jr.

I spend a great deal of time talking with people about parenting. I often hear a version of; “that’s great but I don’t have any kid’s.” I’m passionate about changing our limited views about parenting and get that kind of feedback a lot. It’s been an uphill challenge to change the ideas that currently shape our understanding of the vast complexity of being a parent. Parenting plays a pivotal role in forming the nature of who we are and determines the world we live in. We need to move away from most of our shame based, advice driven approaches to parenting and focus on how we can empower each parents own unique qualities. We are all affected, to large degree, by our views about parenting; whether we are parents or not. It’s time we embrace the social psychology of the parent system.   

"Understanding Parenting"

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.” Albert Einstein

The historical challenge we have faced in understanding parenting is making sense out of the entire parent-child system. It is the very nature of what and how we think that have limited our ability to understand parenting in the context of both time and space. This dynamic relationship between parent and child is an ongoing process that is characterized by the changing world we live in. In short if we truly want to have a better understanding of parenting we must become more flexible in accepting a more inclusive model. It is only by considering the interactive dynamics of the entire parent-child system that we can fully comprehend and appreciate the complexities of parenting.

Our current parenting models have seemingly lost their way on the modern technological information superhighways. They have not been able to keep pace with the ever changing landscapes of our expanding world. It is only by building a more inclusive approach to parenting that we can develop a model that has the adaptability to guide us into the future. By asking better questions we can start to better understand of what means in “Becoming a Better Parent.” What we need is a more comprehensive approach to parenting that takes into consideration the complete context within which they are embedded. 

I have often found myself both professional and personally struggling to recombine and add to the current parenting resources in finding the right solutions at the right time. The problem remains that although there is a great deal of helpful information it often miss the boat by focusing on only a relative few aspects of the entire parenting process. It is difficult for these approaches to provide the dynamic flexibility needed to account for the influences of a multidimensional perspective of parenting. If we look at the context of parenting from the vast array of individual and group influences, our current one size fits all model lacks the necessary ingredients for understanding.          

Minimalistic views of parenting have often tried to reduce our overall understanding of the entire parenting continuum to only a few variables. Advice to parents is often handed out like candy at a parade and although popular these situational based onions lack the sustenance for true change. Still other approaches often over emphasize the tools, techniques, strategies and styles of parenting and miss the purpose behind the meaning. However the important of these existing models of parenting cannot be ignored and they provide the foundation for future parental growth. The underlying fault created within the heart of parenting has been our inability to grasp the true nature of the relationship between parent and child.

Why Now: A Parenting Dilemma

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”  T.S. Eliot

I recently finished my book on parenting called "Becoming a Better Parent: Ten Things We Needed To Learn Growing Up" and I'm in the process of looking for a publisher. I wanted to start this blog to create a forum to address the importance of parenting. However, you might be asking yourself  “why another book on parenting?” History has shown us that understanding and defining parenting is one of the most important tasks we face. Parents, and those who support them, carry the weight of our future generations and our responsibility to our children is critical to the success of our civilization.

However “Becoming a Better Parent” does not mean “making better children.” The idea that we can mix together all the right ingredients for a parental soup that we can then force feed our children is only a recipe for disaster. Current parenting approaches have made it difficult to address these aspects of self-determinism related to free will and choice and cannot be fully explained or appreciated with our current cause and effect or social based models of parenting. Simply put no matter “how many kings’ horses or kings’ men” we have acquired about parenting our current models are often unable to determine how to put the parental “humpty dumpty back together again.”

The challenge has been to find a way for us to make sense of this phenomenon and it is only by constructing a model that considers both the parts and whole of the entire parent-child system that we can fully comprehend the true complexities of parenting. There seems to be an obvious theme emerging out of our current models and research of parenting that something else is needed. The very nature of parenting has created gaps in our understanding, as we continue to experience the accelerated rates of change that bombard us from every direction. Most of our current models are unable to embrace an evolving vision for parenting that allows us to deal with instantaneous information.

We all know that there are no all-inclusive parental handbooks and we need to strongly question anyone who would claim differently. However, by creating a parental compass that points within we can start to find our own internal directions in “Becoming a Better Parent.” Finding our way through the parental maze can be difficult and many of us have often found ourselves lost on this journey. This book is intended to be a road map that is provided as a hitchhiker’s guide to parenting. By developing a more compressive directional compass we can better understand the road signs ahead so we can all work together on making this a better place for all our children’s tomorrows.