I was chatting with an old friend and she said jokingly, “They sure didn’t teach me about this in parenting school!” in response to some parenting challenge. I had to chuckle—it reminded me of how when my children were little, I would tell them that I would “lose my Mom license” if I did things like let them run in the sprinkler in March or eat candy bars before dinner. It got me to thinking of what classes I would have liked to have prior to taking on the role of parent. If there really had been a parenting school, what would I have needed to learn to prepare me for the past two decades of being a mom?
I would have liked to have had a good training course in communication—how to communicate with different kids at different ages in different circumstances. To date, no matter how skilled I think I become in communicating with my kids, I find there’s still so much I don’t know. A good class in how to communicate with a two-year-old, a nine-year-old and a teenager (not to mention every age in between) would have been a real bonus.
I also would have benefited from an extensive course in gender studies. Not just they typical stereotypes, but all the nuances and chemical and physical differences between the genders at various ages. Raising boys and girls has been different, but not in any of the easy ways I expected. An extensive workshop in society, biology, and politics as they relate to gender and childhood would have been marvelous.
Finally, I think a good course would have been one all about the delicate art of balancing—family, work, life—how to cope and “bounce” when everything unravels at once and you’ve still got to keep being the go-to Mom. Not that I haven’t learned plenty from the school of hard knocks—but, boy, wouldn’t I have benefited from a night course at parenting school! How about you? What do you think you could have learned BEFORE you became a parent?