Parenting Styles

I'm enjoying the time with les bebes, but I will be glad when their parents return late tonight.

My mother was very strict with me, therefore I thought that was the way parenting had to be done. Never mind that how she treated me didn't work on me. I still used that rigid form of parenting on my boys.

Before he and Jaci left on Friday, Tyler said to me, "we try to say 'no' as little as possible." Well, for me that's very difficult. When I hear one of them teasing the other, it makes me crazy. It takes me back to the horrors of my brothers (seeming) incessant teasing of me and my mother's refusal to make them stop.

In my mind, if I get them to understand the havoc they're wreaking on each other's sweet little psyches, maybe they'll stop and be more self-assured adults. Okay, I can dream, can't I?

I believe every parent acts in his or her perceived best interest of the child. I make an exception for drug- or alcohol-addicted parents, who are so self-involved they cannot even act in their own best interest, much else their child's.

But I think we each do the best we know how to do, and by the Grace of the Unknowable, we all grow up anyway. My daddy always said a child's two greatest obstacles to growing up were his or her parents.

My goal is not to be an obstacle in the lives of my children or my grandchildren.