Countercultural Parenting: How to Not be Special?

Although we may all often yearn to be exceptional, different or unique, the one time that one wishes to be nothing but normal, average and mainstream is as the  parent of a young child. In that first year your greatest desire is that the child puts on weight, rolls, walks, gurgles and behaves exactly according to the prescribed norm and hits each milestone in a reliably average fashion. There is nothing more satisfying, as the parent of a young child, than to hear that your offspring is totally standard.

Likewise, with parenting long-term, I am constantly striving to feel I am “normal”, and following the prescribed wisdom about how to be a “good parent”. Irritatingly, I have found myself stubbornly countercultural, against my own will:

1. The first parenting culture I seem constantly counter to is what I might call “Traditional Czech”. (There is, most likely, a similar genre of “Traditional English”, except that this died out some time in the progressive 1960s and now lies buried under six decades of child-centred caring). Traditional Czech teaches strong discipline – the child knows who is boss. They go to bed alone at 7pm exactly, shut the door and do not come out. They get a sharp smack if they misbehave in public and know damn well not to do it again. They eat what is put in front of them and if they don’t, then they go to bed hungry. I have to say I fantasise about the results of “Traditional Czech” if not the means. I would love to simply put my child into bed at 7pm and walk out of the room. Also, obviously, I would like to be able to effectively silence him with a threat in public. But I am afraid that, whether due to personality or upbringing, I do not have a “Traditional Czech” parenting bone in my body.

2. The parenting culture I actually adopted after the birth of both my kids is probably more like ‘Attachment Parenting”, which advocates prolonged physical closeness and fulfilling the child’s needs fully rather than denying them. I have slept in the same bed as my kids since birth, mainly for breastfeeding purposes at first, but now because I can’t get the little squatters out. They show no signs of wanting to go to sleep or to stay asleep alone – and my natural instinct is to accommodate their bedsharing while gently steering/bribing/tricking them into habits that would be more acceptable for me (i.e., me sharing a bed with an adult or simply ALONE). In theory, a child blissfully pressed up against his mother will sleep, well, like a baby. They don’t. By all accounts, they seem to sleep better when in a dark room on their own. Thus the issue I have with attachment parenting is that fulfilling the need doesn’t seem to lead to anybody growing beyond it. So far there seems to be no end to their attachment and the result is tired, overstretched parents and beds full to falling out.

3. This leads to the topic of setting and holding boundaries. In this area, the parenting culture I would love to actually fit into but find myself constantly falling out of is what might be called respectful or creative parenting. I love the methodology of “healing games” (léčivé hraní) laid out by Aletha Solter, which demonstrates how so many problems and misunderstandings of the  parent-child dynamic can be healed and energized through the games that children instigate and invite us to play with them. Bearing witness to the child’s inherent instinct for self-actualisation and following where they take us can be a magical, mysterious process. I also follow the advice of “How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk” (Faber and Mazlish) in describing problematic situations objectively and making respectful requests of the child or creating solutions together. “The Whole-Brain Child” (Siegel and Bryson) offers insights into how to connect emotionally with a child before trying to solve conflicts and thus teach them over time to integrate the emotional and logical parts of their brains. The insights of this parenting culture transform what can be very boring, repetitive and frustrating interactions with children into something creative, interesting, mysterious even, and return the parental relationship to a state of working creativity. And these approaches actually seem to work!

The problem with this culture is, simply…….me. The reason I often fall out of it is my own immaturities, lack of patience, moodiness, unwillingness to let go, or simply exhaustion. So I often find myself inhabiting parenting cultures I do not really wish to stay in long-term and somewhat exiled from those parenting cultures I admire.  Thus, I am stubbornly countercultural in an area in which I would love nothing more than to conform.  

So, if you happen to run into myself and my kids about town, do make an effort to comment on how unremarkable, standard and mainstream we all are. You might just make my day that little bit more special.