By ClickWriteCornwall

10th November 2016

What does it mean to be a positive parent? Here one mum shares the highs and lows of the first year.

By ClickWriteCornwall

10th November 2016

By ClickWriteCornwall

10th November 2016

I’m not entirely sure what positive parenting means, other than there are some days when it’s a walk in the park being positive. Other days, it’s a little harder, to say the least.

I’m the very proud mother of a fast moving 15 month old bundle of joy and energy. He’s funny, loving and super-smart and he’s also hit early toddlerhood. As he develops his likes, dislikes and opinions, I think it’s fair to say, we don’t always see eye to eye. Take yesterday. Yesterday I wanted him to go into his car seat. I know, how cruel. And my son agrees with you, because not only did he not want to go into the car seat, he didn’t want to go into the car! He therefore decided to let everyone in the carpark know about my unreasonable behaviour. My pleading a sign of weakness, my desperate attempts at communicating why he should sit in the car, dismissed as mere pettifoggery.

For a child that is largely content, often laughing, very obliging, and really quite logical, this strong will (so early on) has surprised, but also delighted. Don’t get me wrong, the carpark showdown as it will henceforth be referred to, exhausted me. I was upset because he was upset. It was, in short, a horrible experience. However, it was also a sign of his development. After all, we do want him to know what he wants and needs. My wife and I didn’t have a child for him or her not to want to grab life. It’s important to us that he has opinions.

We want him to be engaged with the world, with people and politics; to act with courage; to laugh often, but also to say clearly - but without arrogance or unkindness - I can’t or I don’t want to do that, when he needs to. So to be fair, he is following a script we had already begun to write for him. I think we’re just a little taken aback at how ‘method’ he can be…

Having our son, after seven years of trying, has made me more positive. It wasn’t a long journey to be fair, I am blessed with being a hopeful, generally very happy, person. But the profound joy I feel when I watch him play; or when he figures something out by himself and then looks at me, dimples bookending his triumphant and cheeky grin; or when he toddles off in front of us, because he is fearless and curious in equal measure, I think then that I must in some way qualify as a positive parent. Or perhaps it’s because we don’t shout - or worse - when he gets ‘spirited’. Or maybe because we genuinely try and imagine what it must be like to explain how you feel when your only consistent words are: dog, mama, tractor, door, no, car, bag and poon (that’s spoon without the ’s’. Obviously.).

As a parent, there are frequent moments of incredulity. We have uttered the words, ‘please stop licking the rug’ and ‘have you wee’d on the dog?!’, for example. There have been low points, when nothing makes much sense. We’ve put unwashed laundry on the washing line and I didn’t much care when I found baby sick in my bra. (I did change my bra, but more because I felt I should, and would be judged harshly if I didn’t comply with society’s inflexible social mores, rather than any burning desire to have sick-free underwear. I was very tired.) I suspect Dorothy Parker coined the phrase “what fresh hell is this” after someone opened a nappy bucket in front of her. The smell of unwashed nappies is eyewateringly bad. There are times when they cry so much you think, I’ll just go sit in the garden. In the rain. In my pyjamas. I cried a lot when during one particularly nappy change the poo just didn’t stop coming, or on another occasion when as lorries thundered by the very narrow lay-by in which I was parked, I was trying to deal with a catastrophic poo leak.

But the plus side is, they’re nuts. They find peek-a-boo utterly hilarious, as well as pretending to eat their feet. They frequently have yoghurt goatees. They giggle at their own farts, or when you hold them upside down. They love blowing raspberries on naked skin. Our son eats sand and snails. He also eats food he finds in the car seat, which slatterns that we are, may have been there longer than we care to admit. I’ve made up silly poems and songs for him since he was born, which he started to recognise from a very early age, and which he laughs and claps along to. When I go upstairs, weary from a long day and sore from arthritis, and he’s asleep next to our bed, the beauty of that moment has actually caused me to shed tears. (Very, very quietly.) Some days he’s Mister Independent but then suddenly leans on my legs, or snuggles under my arm, which causes strange things to happen to my heartbeart.

I want him to plough his own furrow, and I’m encouraged that we’re helping him do that. When we can’t always understand him we redouble our efforts to listen to what he’s trying to say. We let him have choice when we can, but if we can’t, we hold steadfast and support each other to do what we think is right. When we get things wrong, we apologise to him because he deserves that.

There are challenges bringing up boys, the most obvious is that the world tells them they must be strong and brave, when in fact it is impossible to be strong and brave all the time. And anyway, true strength is accessed through forgiveness, empathy, sensitivity and kindness. As feminists, we feel very strongly about how people should interact and treat each other, but again, we’re living in a society that encourages boys and men to sexualise, trivialise and dismiss girls and women - and their efforts. The biggest threat to our planet is climate change, yet the internet and television tells us we don’t have enough, and sometimes, I’m weak enough to believe it. I’m hoping he has slightly more fortitude. We’re just hoping we can muddle along together and help him to decipher the important messages in a world of white noise.

These 15 months have been extraordinary. From the minute I held him as he came into the world, to just now, when he wiped something unidentifiable (but which I’m hoping is food based) on my leg, every day is different, yet the same. So I’m still not entirely sure what constitutes positive parenting (I think it’s like reward based training for dogs. Don’t judge me, I’ve had 9 dogs in my life and only 1 child), but I do know that we’re doing a good job, he’s doing a great job, and that is more than we could have ever hoped for.

That, I think, is pretty positive.

Alison Livingstone is ‘mum of one, wife of one, owned by two rescue dogs, co-parent turkey farmer, scared of spiders, not scared of jam doughnuts. I’m a writer and occasional photographer. Happy, but even more so when I’m writing, or on a moor/by the sea with our amazing little boy’. @Click_Write

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