The ABCs of Parenthood Read online

  Q is for Quilt

  A quilt is a whole stitched together from many parts. So, too, is an extended family. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, stepparents, stepsiblings, close friends: all, if and when possible, should be woven into the fabric of your children’s lives.

  Teach your children about their family’s rich history, customs, and roots. Introduce them to distant cousins who share strands of their DNA. Attend and plan family reunions. Bring outsiders in. The families we create are just as important as the families into which we are born: sometimes more so if we are cut off from our birth families through long distance or short fuses.

  Share holidays, birthdays, and milestones together. Dance in a circle to mark the occasion. There’s a reason why so many cultures worldwide have embraced the ancient ritual of circle dancing as a means of family and community bonding. It’s the dancing equivalent of a quilting circle: a warm, beautiful, organic whole made greater than the sum of its parts.

  R is for Romance

  Share and celebrate romance in your home, and do so with style and passion. Open your arms and your heart. Give compliments, hugs, foot rubs, and breakfasts in bed. Hold hands. Humans naturally desire and benefit emotionally and physically from touch and warm connections of all sorts.

  Stake out time for adult romance apart from the kids, anything from a date night to a luxurious afternoon “nap” to a whirlwind weekend trip in the spring, just you two. Parents need time alone, both to reboot and to remember why they fell in love and made babies in the first place. Moreover, modeling healthy, reciprocal love is the best way to teach your child about its transcendence.

  Are you a single parent? All the more reason to make time for romance in your life, whether that means planning and going on a date or simply taking the time to love yourself, with candles around the bathtub or a night out with adoring friends.

  S is for Seahorse (and Starfish)

  The male seahorse and his brothers in the Syngnathidae family are the only living male creatures on earth who give birth. Some starfish are so gender fluid that they can toggle between male and female. On their own, these are cool facts. As metaphors for the possibilities of a post-gendered world, they’re even more remarkable.

  As enlightened as so many of us might consider ourselves when it comes to gender roles in parenting, deeply ingrained stereotypes are hard to break. The mother is traditionally seen as nurturer. The father is seen as the provider, even though most of us don’t fit into these narrow boxes. We are all nurturers, all providers.

  Our children are no more stereotypical than we are. “Boys will be boys” and “girls will be girls” are essentially meaningless phrases.

  So if ever you find your child’s self-expression stifled by the genderist judgments of others—or even yourself rankled by being boxed into a stereotypical parenting role—remember the seahorse and starfish and this: life’s ocean is vast, its mysteries deep, and myriad creatures can dwell within.

  T is for Telephone

  Look up from your phone. What do you see? Many others staring into their phones as well.

  We’re living in an increasingly connected digital world, which is wonderful both for productivity and for the sharing and discovery of information. Your phone is also a great way to stay in touch with your child and say, “I care about you and am thinking of you right now” via a quick smiley face or other digital shorthand (and, as they get older, the inevitable, “Where R U???”). The connection between parent and child is compromised, however, by competition with the constant stimuli and cry for attention our telephones continually provide and demand. Sure, you may really want to Google “What is the difference between Swiss chard and kale?” right now, or seek an alternate route around the accident, or answer an email from the boss, or “like” a photo of a friend’s new baby, but at what cost to your relationship with your own child?

  Our tendency to be enslaved by a tiny machine that’s supposed to serve us instead is both ironic and a not- so-minor modern-day tragedy. Whenever you and your kid are together, try to remind yourself that many more of life’s important questions can be answered in your child’s eyes than on the screen of your phone, however “smart.”

  U is for Understanding

  Everybody wants to feel understood, and a child feels this acutely. Listen to them. Let them know that what they articulate, even non-verbally, is important. Try the tool of reflective listening. Repeat back what they say, rephrased, and ask them if you “got it.” It’s a great way to diffuse frustration escalation and to ensure they feel heard, which is one of the more crucial courtesies humans give one another.

  Find ways to have conversations that don’t require eye contact or formality: a hike, a car ride, a walk on the beach, or the golden, drowsy interval before bedtime. A younger child will let you know that they feel understood when they stop proclaiming and relax or soften. With an older child, you may have to read between the lines. A text message that reads, “I’m coming home, and I want to do the thing where we sit on the couch and I talk and you don’t,” is actually a compliment: it means that your child feels understood and loved enough to express their needs openly and honestly.

  V is for Victory

  What is victory? Is it winning the race, finishing it, or making a fine effort? Is it crushing the opponent or participating in the match? Is it receiving a trophy or feeling the satisfaction of achieving a personal best? For so long parents and educators have urged kids to win win win— to nab the sports trophy, the debate medal, the acceptance to a prestigious college. But what if we define victory through a totally different lens? A “win” can be so much more than a plastic trophy and bragging rights. It can be deep personal satisfaction and nourishment. It can involve leadership, improvement, a heroic effort, or a glorious fail that is told and retold at family gatherings with love and humor: that time I ran to third base instead of first; that audition when my violin bow snapped in the middle of the second movement.

  If your child feels sad over having “lost” a competition, respect those feelings but also celebrate all the ways in which they’re winning or have won: by staying in the game, by taking the high road, by speaking their truth, and by choosing to expand their mind and make new discoveries.

  W is for Work

  Work fills the coffers and puts dinner on the table. Family vacations, meal times, getting home at a reasonable hour, and finding time to unwind in a hot bath with a good book are worthy of similar application. Be wary, too, of the digital drain of after-work texts and emails, unless you’re lucky enough to live in Germany, where calling or emailing an employee after work has been deemed illegal.

  Demonstrate how important professional work is for personal fulfillment and financial stability. But don’t fret if you find yourself taking the periodic slow lane or off-ramp to be more available to your children when they are very young or later, when they are entering adolescence. The work of being a good and present parent is just as valid as paid work, and these are the two key times of intense transition and need in your child’s life.

  X is for X-Ray

  Accidents will happen. It’s inevitable. You will probably spend at least one night in the emergency room with your child, if not more. It’s how you deal with these accidents in the moment that will set the stage for how your child will deal with future emergencies of any kind, not just the ones that require X-rays and stitches.

  Try not to panic or overreact. The goal is not to remain perfectly calm, but rather to maintain an emergency- appropriate awareness of what has happened. First, take a very deep breath and consider what needs to be said. Once you’ve assessed the situation rationally and rapidly, formulate a plan. Is an ambulance required or can you get your child to a medical professional yourself? Who will watch your other children, if you have any?

  Always remember that you are the grown-up in these situations and that your child needs you to keep being one, even when you’re just as confused and scared as they are. Displaying emot
ion is appropriate, but be the anchor and the ground, and quietly go into action. “It’s okay,” you must tell them, over and over again. “I’m here with you and it’s all going to be okay.”

  Y is for Yelling

  Every culture is different, and there’s is nothing wrong with impassioned communication or exhibiting your own humanity from time to time, including venting frustration or other dark feelings. But please, do not regularly holler at your child.

  While less damaging than physical violence, yelling— be it angry scolding or shouting orders—never brings about the best results and takes a long-term toll on self-confidence and well-being. In many families, yelling is a multigenerational tradition, a learned habit that may be hard to break, no matter how strong the desire is to be the last link of that chain.

  If you lose your temper anyway, apologize immediately. On the other hand, feel free to yell and squeal and holler from rapture, excitement, a joke, or a moment well lived. Life can be such a rickety rollercoaster. Especially once you add kids into the mix. Sometimes, at the top of a particularly steep hill, when you’ve reached that beautiful apex between extreme effort and joyful descent, you might just feel the need to throw your hands in the air, take a deep breath, and let out a full-throated scream.

  Z is for Zzzzzzzz

  From the moment the nurse wheels in your hungry, wailing baby at 3:00 a.m. that first night at the hospital, it hits you: there’s a new normal now, and that normal does not include sleep. You tell yourself that this altered state will last only until your infant sleeps through the night. (Ha!)

  The truth is more nuanced. You will get the occasional night of sleep, but you will also spend countless sleepless nights until your little bird flies the nest. Toddlers catch every bug under the sun and always seem to regurgitate last night’s dinner all over the family’s REM cycle. Young children can get anxious and go through long, extended stages when they wake you up with their demon-filled nightmares. Pre-teens have noisy sleepovers that will leave bags as large as carry-on suitcases under your eyes. And teenagers will keep you up nearly every weekend, worrying about their safety. It’s a Catch-22, because parenting requires patience. And patience requires sleep. And sleep is the holy grail of parenting.

  We’ve got nothing to offer here in terms of advice except this: Coffee is your friend. Naps are your friends. Helpful grandparents are your friends. And when you find yourself with the rare full night when no one needs you, power down, turn off the lights, and take advantage of it.

  Afterword

  We wanted this book to be playful, whimsical, inspiring, and fun. Planting seeds that sprout and blossom over time and filling up the proverbial glass are more interesting than making lots of rules. A great gardener once said, “If you have to weed, you didn’t plant enough plants.” The same can be said of parenting. Instead of imposing strict rules and harsh punishments, show your children the values by which your family lives and the standards by which you nurture your spirits, and the rest will fall into place.

  Thank you for reading our modest book. It means a great deal to us, and we are grateful to have been given this opportunity to share whatever insights we’ve gleaned from our own experiences. We are by no means parenting experts, but between the two of us we have raised four beautiful babies into thriving humans who miraculously still love us. We’ve learned a bit about what works and what doesn’t, oftentimes through our own mistakes.

  Parenting is hard work, perhaps the hardest work of your life. No parent gets it 100 percent right, but those of you who try are our heroes. When in doubt, just open your heart as wide as it will go, and love. If that doesn’t work, open it a bit wider.

  Acknowledgments

  The authors wish to thank:

  Our respective children, Nico LeMoal-Polumbo, and Jacob, Sasha, and Leo Kogan, for their love;

  Christine Carswell and the rest of the team at Chronicle Books—Jennifer Tolo Pierce, Evelyn Liang, Sara Waitt, Natalie Beaulieu, Freesia Blizard, and Alexandra Brown— for shepherding this book so skillfully from infancy to adulthood;

  Lisa Leshne, for adopting us into her fold and for making sure our little book had all the agency it needed to make its way out into the world;

  Susan Kaplan and Tom Gillard, for birthing our curiosity of letters and words; and Christopher James, for encouraging a love of images;

  A special thanks to our folks, Richard & Sarah Zacks and Richard & Marjorie Copaken, without whom we would not be possible and from whom we certainly learned a compelling thing or two.

  Finally, this book was a collaboration between friends. We both conceived of it. We both wrote it. We both shot it. As such, each of us would like to thank the other, for playing nicely in life’s sandbox.

  Dave Cross

  Deborah Copaken is the New York Times bestselling author of The ABCs of Adulthood, The Red Book, and Shutterbabe. She’s also a screenwriter, Observercolumnist, award-winning and internationally exhibited photographer, and former Emmy award–winning news producer at ABC and NBC.

  Her writing and photography have also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Nation, among many other publications worldwide. She lives at the tippy-top of Manhattan and is a proud mother of three.

  Randy Polumbo is a renowned sculptor, photographer, illustrator, and now writer. His art has been privately collected and publicly exhibited, both in the United States and abroad. He lives at the southernmost tip of Manhattan and is the proud father of a daughter.