Gently putting my 2-month-old baby to a nap in his bassinet, listening to the usual Seattle rain drizzling on the ready-to-blossom plum tree outside, I feel like writing about parenting.
Obviously, I'm still a novice and probably would never feel confident enough even after a few years or maybe forever about being a good parent. Like all the other challenges one comes across, just face it, play with it, and move on with it. I began to read some parenting books directly or indirectly since I was pregnant last year (the indirect ones mean some books were more about self-development but can be easily transferred to one's parenting). After a steep learning curve of getting to know the baby initially for about 2 months, we started thinking about various activities for our little boy to try out in the future and just some minimal research revealed the vast options we are going to face and just so many paths one can take to grow up. I'll use this blog (and most likely many others) to collect some thoughts.
The first thing I could think of regarding parenting is actually what not to do based on my own experience. Grateful as I am for my mother's sole effort of raising me (my father was mostly absent despite it had been a three-people family, that's perhaps another reflection) and a comfortable life I have been living thanks to my mother, I feel stuck by some thoughts that things could have been different:
1. Everything about the environment a child is growing up in is so important. Environment includes not just the physical surrounding, who are the caregivers, but any single moment can cast an experience for the child and forge into their memory. Though kids don't seem to have memories about early childhood, but I can remember some snippets of things like I was looking out of the window waiting for mom to come home while my grandma holding me under my arms so I can "stand" on my feet on the table, or when I learnt to squat and I was showing my cousin my bottom has something that I can use to pee (oh well), and a extremely cold winter the cute chicks that my grandma allowed me to raise inside her condo were shivering and we put them on the bed under a comforter (I try not to think about how much poop and where that would entail). I remembered my grandma's condo was always a hub for my family, cousins, aunts and uncles, grandma and grandpa. Back then the condo felt very crowded (as a great thing for me), and there were always something going on. I remembered some images of people watching Hong Kong horror movies on TV and even today I remembered some of the scenes that would give a sleepless night. And the tape of ghost stories my cousin was listening also scared the hell out of me for a long long time, probably even until I was about to start college. I remembered being ordered by my mom to mop our home when she was out sometimes, I would not do it or only do the entrance mat, not because I was lazy but because I was afraid to go through the living room and pass by the TV (because there was a famous horror movie talking about ghost crawl out of a TV). And when my mom came back home, she would of course detect that I didn't clean and I was lying, then I was beat because of both. Somehow my mom never realized that I lied frequently in my childhood wasn't because I was lazy or intended to do things that she didn't like, but I was scared by some snippets of horror movies. I think I told my mom once what bothered me to fall asleep, and my mom said ghost stories are not real, period. I wasn't fully convinced and kept being scared, and just stayed mostly my childhood in my room, studying, because that would make me forget that I was scared of those ghosts, meanwhile I wouldn't directly look at the only beautiful pricey barbie doll standing on my bookshelf covered with dust - I never liked that barbie or any dolls, they might turned alive (or ghost). This may all sound absurd to anyone, that I would be afraid of ghosts for this long - basically my whole childhood, just because of a few scenes that I saw or heard from a few movies/tape stories and I would have behaved like a liar sometimes because of fear. My takeaways are:
- Try not to make a kid exposed to things that would deeply scare them, especially even you're enjoying some entertainments (e.g. horror movies/stories), don't forget the potential impact on the kids who are hanging out nearby.
- While it's not possible to know what may leave a bad influence on the kids, but when identifying some behaviors or when they first be open to tell you what bothers them, take time, enough time, to listen to them, show sympathy, be supportive. Don't just say casually like "that's not real, move on". The kids may even know (or heard enough times) that they are not real, but they may still be stuck at the same thought/fear, for decades. And if you just put out their hope of seeking understanding the first time they were open, you may lose any other opportunities.