Parental Development

Back to school season. This year my kids will get everything they ever wanted, which happens to align with what I want for them. They’ll learn some lessons the hard way, and grow from them. My finances will be in order and I won’t be surprised by a single thing on my calendar. Y’all too, right? 

Okay, so maybe that’s not quite accurate, but I do have goals and specific things that I hope to do differently this year. All the ideas and plans bubbling around in my heart and mind originate from three places: books, professional development, and the discussion of both with friends. 

As a teacher, we talk a lot about growth. We purposefully engage in annual professional development, more often than not based on specific goals. In summer, I travel with a group of students through an organization called Students Shoulder-to-Shoulder, and every year instructors gather for three days to discuss our purpose and our how. We review our learnings, revise best practices for our programs and deepen relationships with one another. 

This year I left the training with the realization that while I am purposeful about professional development, I’m not too purposeful about parental development. I’m interested in learning more, but rarely target specific issues, identify resources, establish conversational partnerships, and build reflection time into my schedule. 

Why the heck not? This parenting thing is a big job, so why don’t I treat it as such? 

So, one of my goals this year is developing the habit of being a more reflective parent. Do my actions match my words and my intentions with our boys? When I check in with the boys, do my intended messages get through? Do their words and actions reflect whatever glorious wisdom I’m trying to impart? Am I really listening to what they share? 

As I reflected on my summer reading, a clear throughline ran through the non-fiction books I read: relationships. It’s no secret we need them. It’s no secret our children need them. It was both sad and disappointing to read how children perceive from their parents that relationships are not the priority, especially during the school year. 

Unlike in previous generations, the input available to us as parents and the input available to our children is innumerable. Purposefully culling and exploring resources around parental development is worth our time, as are conversations in fellowship to share our findings and experiences. So rather than sharing my take-aways and deeper reflections, I commend three books I read this summer. 

1. BoyMom: Reimaging Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman – Whippman is a self-proclaimed feminist who finds herself as the mother of three boys. She takes on understanding boyhood and masculinity with the eye of a reporter, and finds a lot of her pre-parenting suppositions challenged. I recommend this to parents of boys of all ages and anyone with young men they love in their lives. 

2. Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do About It by Jennifer Breheny Wallace – Wallace also approaches her subject through a reporter’s eye and examines the critical importance of mattering. We all feel healthier when we believe we matter, and going to a “good college” doesn’t do the trick. So how did we get to a place where we build childhood and adolescence around that goal? The degree to which students share what they internalize from well-meaning parents is worth your time. 

3. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs – I.love.this.book, so much that I reread it every few years. Jacobs highlights the “repugnant cultural other” and our reflex to not only identify this group in our lives but how we respond to them most often with our intuitive and instinctive part of our brain. He walks us through the mechanics of cognition and how we can reclaim purposeful thinking, enabling us to live better with the people we disagree with in our world. While I certainly don’t consider our teenagers “repugnant,” this book helps me remember to pause and think about my responses to their behavior, requests, and culture. 

For Jesus, success looks like choosing to love others. I think Paul’s manual for success is found in Romans 12; a chapter I come back to whenever my parenting compass gets out of whack. It’s a chapter I reread when I’m caught up in the momentary (social) anxiety of parenting a “successful” kiddo.

What resources do you recommend for parental development?