Fertile Soil for Good Guidance

In parenting, I (Joseph) am starting to think it’s less about a right or wrong way, rather creating fertile soil for good guidance.

Bear with me, I’m trying to parse out this idea.

We try to talk to our kids about as much as we believe they can handle at the specific ages they are, but that doesn’t mean some things won’t come through. Sometimes they do. It’s at that point you have to have conversations, and those conversations are nuanced and complicated. Sometimes you have less of the audience’s attention than you’d like to explain them, but you try anyway, desperately hoping they heard your heart. Other times they bulldoze their way through your home and you have to figure them out.

These kids haven’t always been the age they are now. I don’t know how to parent this child at that age. The truth is that every parent from the beginning of time had to experience this universal feeling of “I don’t know what to do…do you?”

It’s what fireside conversations are made of. Those nights opening up to friends about the challenge that parenting is, only to be met in enthusiastic agreement.

The truth (read: agreement with reality) about all of this is that none of us will do this right. Our kids will have complaints about doing or not doing or expecting or not caring or 1000 other variations on the one thing that is somewhat universal: growing up is hard, and when you meet that hardness you look for who’s to blame.

So if you hurt them, say you’re sorry. If they need you, be there. If they love something, learn to love it too.

Nothing has happened in my life to provoke this post except the hope that it really will be ok.

I am Joseph Hinson, and I have no idea what I’m doing in parenting. Welcome to the club.