The ABCs of Parenthood Read online

  For Jacob, Sasha, Leo, and Nico

  Copyright © 2017 by Deborah Copaken and Randy Polumbo

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

  ISBN 978-1-4521-5290-5 (hc)

  ISBN 978-1-4521-5768-9 (epub, mobi)

  Design by Jennifer Tolo Pierce

  Chronicle books and gifts are available at special quantity discounts to corporations, professional associations, literacy programs, and other organizations. For details and discount information, please contact our premiums department at [email protected] or at 1-800-759-0190.

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680 Second Street

  San Francisco, California 94107

  www.chroniclebooks.com

  Contents

  A is for Acceptance 9

  B is for Boundaries 11

  C is for Cucumber 13

  D is for Dog 15

  E is for Earthquake 17

  F is for Family Dinner 19

  G is for Glitter 21

  H is for Helicopter 23

  I is for Ice Cream 25

  J is for Jazz 27

  K is for Kangaroo 29

  L is for Love 31

  M is for Money 33

  N is for Naughty 35

  O is for . . . 37

  P is for Praise 39

  Q is for Quilt 41

  R is for Romance 43

  S is for Seahorse (and Starfish) 45

  T is for Telephone 47

  U is for Understanding 49

  V is for Victory 51

  W is for Work 53

  X is for X-Ray 55

  Y is for Yelling 57

  Z is for Zzzzzzzz 59

  Afterword 61

  Acknowledgments 63

  About the Author 65

  A is for Acceptance

  Short, tall, round, straight, daring, meek, cheerful, dour, rugged, dainty: every child is a mystery to be celebrated rather than solved.

  From the moment your child meets the world, impressionable and innocent, your home is the place where they can flourish and grow into themselves judgment free. Children will automatically compare themselves to others and find themselves lacking or out-of-step. Teach them that differences are the ingredients that make life rich and enchanting. There’s poetic beauty in a tree that has bent to years of wind, the off-key song, the messy paintings that are all masterpieces. Inspire your child to see the gifts in their mistakes and differences.

  B is for Boundaries

  A boundary is a mutually acceptable line of separation between you and your growing small person: the crib, time alone, the hug they’d rather not give. It’s the single sock it takes your toddler ten minutes to put on solo, determined to “Do it self.” It’s the door your teenager purposefully closes.

  Respecting a child’s needs and boundaries teaches them, in turn, to respect yours. Cheerfully acknowledge their privacy and personal space, and try not to force or demand affection. Time alone with friends and private spaces are their sanctuary. Delineating your own boundaries is equally important, everything from the manners you’d like observed, to help around the house, to your own private life.

  C is for Cucumber

  Once a pickle, never a cucumber again.

  The presence and purity of a newborn is inspiring: the way they fall rapt into a trance as they gaze at a ceiling fan, a kitten, or a rainbow diffraction of sunlight through glass. Devoid of fear or shame, incapable of self-censorship, the infant is free to devour the world.

  Encourage that curiosity. Share in that feast. Watch what they’re watching, read what they’re reading, browse what they’re browsing, either together or apart, and be prepared to act as interpreter when necessary. Help your child learn to smile at the good and frown at the bad. For early and often our children will be exposed to experiences that can cause them to grow up too fast.

  Keep your precious creature a cucumber for as long as you can. Nothing is as sacred, beautiful, and fleeting.

  D is for Dog

  “Can we get a dog? Please, can we get a dog?” Consider forgoing the years of pleading and get one now. Yes, your sneakers might get chewed, but what’s a little gnawed sole next to your child’s awed soul?

  Caring for a dog teaches joyful and invaluable life lessons, as well as offering affectionate touch, warmth, and unconditional love. The work of training a pet allows a child to experience boundary-setting from a parent’s perspective. Feeding rituals, bath time, and poo-mucking, done with intention and love, become a chance for bonding and learning responsibility. The sorrow of burying a pet teaches small hearts how precious and fleeting life is.

  Not ready for a dog? Practice on a cat. Try to keep a houseplant alive. If you succeed, visit a shelter. Yes, you’ll be the one walking Fido, but there’s a beautiful rhythm and punctuation to a day that starts and ends with a dog walk. Think of the morning walk as the capital letter at the beginning of this sentence, the nighttime one as the period at the end.

  E is for Earthquake

  Bringing a baby into your home for the first time can feel like a seismological shift in the tectonic plates of your life. The ground shifts. The earth moves. Your once pristine home will be littered with the aftermath of this domestic natural disaster: diapers and onesies and laundry and dishes and unopened bills and tiny socks and breast pumps and miniature sweaters and a car seat and a bouncy seat and several other seats you have no idea what they’re for, but someone said you had to have them, so you have them, and strollers and a nursing pillow and toys and stuffed animals, and just when you feel the earth stand still for one second, seriously, one little second, the aftershocks set in. The explosion of cereal! The crash of blocks and plastic bricks! Good grief, you’ll be tempted to think on a particularly high Richter-scale day, how did a human the size of a small ham unleash this?

  They did. They do. It’s all part of the master plan. And guess what? Eighteen years later, it’ll be so tidy and quiet that you’ll be able to hear a baby sock drop, that stray one you’ll find under the couch the day after your child leaves for college. And when you grip it in your palm, this tiny talisman of what’s been lost, you’ll realize that you’d give anything for just one more day at the epicenter.

  F is for Family Dinner

  Children who grow up in homes where family dinner is a daily ritual do better in school, experience less depression, have larger vocabularies, and are better able to weather adolescence.

  What’s more, frequent home-cooked meals unite the family, providing not only sustenance and warmth, but also a safe space where life’s experiences are shared, triumphs and defeats are recounted, and good-natured ribbing and camaraderie mark the end of the day with respect and comfort.

  Try playing the game “Rose and Thorn,” where each person relates the best and the worst thing that happened to them that day. This teaches gratitude for the blessings they’ve received and provides support or help navigating hardships. Use the good plates whenever you feel like it. Why not? Fill a vase with flowers. Light some candles: the warmth and glow will illuminate these special memories for a lifetime.

  G is for Glitter

  Glitter is both the scourge of a clean home and the surest sign of a happy one, since any parent who allows glitter over the threshold has decided that creativity trumps order.

  Bravo, glitterati! Promoting art and creative play in childhood can translate into substantial results in adulthood. Many successful roads began through playful experimentation and imagination. Film directing might spring from kindergarten puppet shows, engineering from a building block obsession. Ei
nstein credited his ability to ponder unseen forces to playing with the compass his father gave him when he was a child. David Bowie first learned to think outside the box via art classes.

  Encourage creative revelry and discovery in your home with books, musical instruments, art supplies, and found objects. A child who can make their own fun, a playhouse from a cardboard box, a dramatic costume scene decked out in your old finery, or can write a story illustrated with their own works of art will never be bored. What’s more, they will learn to improvise solutions and to enjoy their own company, gifts that will adhere to their future selves like glitter to glue, sparkling and permanent.

  H is for Helicopter

  We’ve all seen them: parents who literally hover over their children at the playground, lest they fall; write their book reports for them, lest they fail; dictate their children’s activities, their friends, their outfits, even their moods, lest they choose the wrong ones. Later, those same parents become the ones who will call up a college professor to argue about a child’s grade or even a son- or daughter- in-law to intervene in a marriage.

  Showing love means allowing your child to succeed or fail on their own merits, not yours.

  If your three-year-old wants to scale the monkey bars themselves, let them. If your seven-year-old creates a diorama of Hogwarts that looks more like a warthog, applaud the effort and let it be. If your nine-year-old asks to walk to school alone, that’s great! You have raised a child who feels loved and trusted enough to make their way out in the world without you (even if you do end up following them at a distance).

  If there are times when you can’t control the itch to intervene, don’t despair. Most kids quickly learn to keep a bicycle upright without needing a parent to hold on to the bike seat or handlebars.

  I is for Ice Cream

  In the early ’80s, the esteemed philosopher Robert Nozick taught an undergraduate class called “The Best Things in Life.” Each lecture covered a different “best,” such as friendship, love, pleasure, play, fame, and power. Of course, he saved the very best of the best for last. During the final lecture of the series, he spent an hour waxing rhapsodic on the topic of ice cream.

  Yes, ice cream. For surely ice cream, as he claimed, is one of life’s great pleasures. The scoops, like a mother’s breast, are round and sweet and made of milk. (Okay, maybe that’s pushing it; still, it’s an interesting theory.) But the real lesson to glean from Nozick’s glorification of ice cream, particularly if you’re a parent, is this: take time with your children to indulge in and savor life’s small, sweet gifts.

  J is for Jazz

  When an orchestra sits down to play a piece of classical music, the instructions for playing it are precisely encoded on the sheet music. Variations occur, sometimes wildly, depending on a number of different factors. But when you go to hear Beethoven’s Ninth, it will pretty much always be Beethoven’s Ninth.

  Not so with parenting. Parenting has no sheet music; no set of operating instructions for how to play it; no roadmap for getting your little one from here to there in tune, on tempo, and without missing a beat.

  Parenting is jazz. It’s syncopation, improvisation, a conversation. It’s a simultaneous reaction to the constant stimuli of the other players as well as a freeform action upon them. It is taking a well-trod theme and riffing on it, making it yours, and sharing it with your children such that they can hear the underlying melody of a time- honored tune and know it’s now yours and theirs, never to be replayed the same way again.

  K is for Kangaroo

  When deciding whether to head out into the world with a child or not, consider the kangaroo’s pouch: its very existence answers the question. Yes, the road might get bumpy, and you definitely will not be able to hop around with the same spring in your step as before; but life beckons, so scoop up that kid and get out there.

  Sure, the other passengers on the plane will give you dirty looks when your baby is screaming. We’ve all been there, and so have they, whether as the infant or as the parent. Maybe you’ll run out of diapers and have to fashion one out of an old T-shirt, or your child will decide to drink from the giardia-laced fountain before a long car trip, or they’ll get bored playing license plate ABCs and start screaming “Are we there yet?” for the ninety-eighth time. So what? It’s all part of the journey.

  A leap with your child into the great unknown need not be long or distant to be meaningful. It can be as simple as a walk around the block, a hike in the woods, an outing for hot chocolate on a cold day, or really any movement in space and time that gets you and your kids out of your normal ruts and routines. Think of it this way: if a kangaroo can travel up to thirty feet per hop with junior safely ensconced within, you know you and your kid can make it to the park.

  L is for Love

  Love is work. It’s easy to say “I love you,” or to talk about love as a noun, but ultimately love is a verb. Help your child spot and learn to emulate the modest soul who “walks the walk,” doing for others and taking the high road.

  Express your love in actions when you greet a friend or a relative, or call your parents, or comfort a child, whether yours or another’s. Volunteer. Bring a meal to an elderly neighbor. Share your good fortune, energy, or advice. Make a snowman, then shovel a stranger’s driveway. Stand up and cheer wildly at the end of the school play. Connect those you love to one another, and celebrate them in a way that is glorious and inspiring.

  M is for Money

  Money is simply green energy that fuels life’s journey, but for so many it is complicated by other issues, usually beginning in childhood.

  When parents don’t talk frankly with their children about money, conceal their wealth or lack thereof, or use it as a tool for love, validation, or control, they unwittingly teach their children to have a shameful or overly fraught relationship with money.

  Money should just be money: paper promises you earn for doing work that you can use to buy experiences, necessities, gifts, or luxuries. Talk about your work and the pride you feel in earning. Teach your children to do and feel the same: chores at home or babysitting can segue into summer jobs when they’re older. Let them use that hard-earned cash to pay for whatever they want, within reason. Give them a budget to buy their own wardrobe. Label three jars “Save,” “Give,” and “Spend,” and place them in your child’s room for sorting their allowance. Once a year, open the jars together, and talk about where it’s all going—or where it’s gone!

  N is for Naughty

  One day, it will happen, if it hasn’t already: your child will do something naughty. They will steal a kid’s toy. Dump sand on a playmate. Push. Shove. Get called in to the principal’s office for leaving the classroom or starting a ruckus or cheating on a test. They will feign illness when they’re well or steal a pack of gum from the child-height candy display under the cash register. They will throw a tantrum or a piece of trash on the sidewalk, hurt another child’s feelings or their own reputation, sabotage dinner out or a weekend morning of sleeping in.

  The question is not if they will be naughty—they will—but how you react to the infraction, both in the heat of the moment and after things cool down. As with all good systems of justice anywhere, the punishment must not only fit the crime but also show compassion. Understand why they did it before coming up with an appropriate response. A child pretending to be sick may be having troubles at school; hurt feelings might have been the result of a misunderstanding. Cheating on a test should obviously result in swift punishment, but it can also result in an important conversation between you and your child about right and wrong, actions and consequences.

  O is for . . .

  An O is the difference between avid and avoid. More is not always better. Avoid Overload. Watch out also for Overstimulated, Overcommitted, and Overtime.

  The pace of modern life has accelerated exponentially to the point where children have little time for relaxation or play. The school day plus homework obligations have become more schedule-consum
ing than fulltime work. Pressures to cram sports, internships, and other resume- building activities preclude the joys of random discovery, self-soothing, and its close friend, peace.

  Every child has the occasional need to go for a walk, to curl up in a corner and read a book, to make a spontaneous date with a friend, and sometimes to do absolutely nothing. Make time “off the grid” for being present: your company and attention are priceless. Keep your child’s phone charger in your room. Ensure that there are unscheduled moments to watch a sunbeam make its way across the floor, to dive deeply into a particular subject, to study a picture, to dig a hole, or to watch an ant or bee go about their daily business. These small moments of focus and flow will set the foundations for a life of serenity, presence, and meaning.

  P is for Praise

  Praise your child often but appropriately. Praise an interesting thought as well as a good report card, a private deed as well as a public performance, a valiant attempt that ends in failure as well as a successful mission.

  Do not praise your child for going down a slide. It’s a slide. It’s what kids do and what occurs naturally when incline meets gravity. If it was their first attempt and they were scared to do it, it’s fine to say, “I’m proud of you for being so brave.” But “Good job!” should be reserved for tasks well done.

  It’s a careful balancing act. Underpraise, and your child will feel you don’t care and refuse to stretch themselves. Treat every minor step they take like a walk on the moon, and watch that child turn into a praise-hungry narcissist. Better simply to shower your child with unconditional love and to enrich their soil with hefty spadesful of humility if you want to see them blossom into an adult with healthy self-esteem.