Miki Dedijer

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Our children deserve less than we got

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I know that my children deserve less than I got. Most likely your child does too.

This doesn’t go down easy, if like me you’re a member of the industrial growth society. Here, most of us by far want to pass on more to our children than our parents gave us.

Such is the script of progress, where more is the plotline of success. More comfort, more convenience, more mobility, more entertainment, more experiences, more activities, more money.

More, as you know, comes at a cost. We take more from those yet to come. We take it from earth and from once thriving communities.

The paradox of more in the times we know is that it inevitably impoverishes all our children, and their children in turn.

The innocent luxuries we have come to take for granted today–juicy tomatoes in December, a quick hop on an airplane, a 23 degree home year-round–are all mortgaged on our children and theirs to come.

As a generation desperately entitled to more, we inevitably deepen our debt spiritually, materially, relationally and morally to our grandchildren. Our legacy of consumerism, of taking more than we give, is an inherited poverty from our own ancestry, one that accrues to our children and theirs to come.

Our children deserve less of this poverty.

A legacy of less consumption but also of less cultural poverty is revolutionary parenting in the industrial growth society.

If you are willing to consider this, you likely belong to a minority of the concerned. If so, you will have to prepare for the day when your child asks you, “Mom, dad, why did you give me less than you got?”

This is a hard question to answer. I doubt there are many parents who have gone before us who ever had to. Yet our children deserve both this diminishing material legacy and our sincere concern for the cultural poverty that underlies it.

Whatever our response, it must somehow be sourced from love rather than self-hatred. It must also adress our obligation to leave enough for our children’s children as our way of affirming life itself, while becoming wise to the gnawing poverty that drives the hunger for more.

And if we get it right, our children, and theirs to come, will know how deep our love ran. They will know us as the ancestors who did their best to be human, accultured, generous and greatful.

Your child’s spiritual doctor

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Your child’s nature unfolds like an oak from an acorn.

Once she has tumbled onto the ground from some mysterious height, it is the soil and the wind and the rains that give her ultimate expression its particular form.

Who she becomes when she’s well rooted and fully extended has painfully little to do with who you are as a parent.

And yet, we readily take it upon us to be our child’s spiritual doctor, to provide the way for her to become what we envision she ought to be.

This is too big a burden for someone as inconsequential as a father or a mother to the innate calling of the child. It’s also a position we don’t have the qualifications or skills for, whatever our ambition, unless that child is someone else’s. If she is, then we might serve her as an elder, a mentor, a trusted uncle or aunt.

Our own child’s spiritual path is laid down by her encounter with the world, what we used to know as the village. And if this village is now unknown to you, as it is to most of us here in the west, you might have placed the full weight of your child onto your weary lap. If you’re a single parent, you will know the strain of this burden all the more.

Parenting this way is an impossibility masquerading as a responsability.

If we take it as our task to be the spiritual doctor of our child, we close the door on the main generational work before all of us fathers and mothers, which is to tend to the threadbare remains of what was once the village, so that it may begin to remember why it came to be in the first place.

This is why parenting today as always before is village-making, not the spiritual doctoring of our own kind. It’s a gathering in of people and beings around all our children, so the world in which they come of age has the willingness and capacity to welcome them and steward them in ways we on our own cannot.

Considered consequence

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You don’t have to be the consequence visited upon your child’s choices.

Let winter teach her what it’s like to rush out without putting on that extra pair of warm socks.

Let molten wax on the knuckle of her pinkie teach her about a burning candle.

The most loving way to parent can be to get out of the way so your child learns through considered consequence.

Then be there whenever needed as a gentle guide for the teaching to take root.

Your secret lover

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Your partner doesn’t know your secret lover called Plan B.

Plan B is softer, more loving, doesn’t smell of onions. It has nicer parents, better health, and always agrees with the values you want to share with your child. Plan B doesn’t age.

It is the other life you dream of when this one seems unbearably mundane, ordinary or average.

You call on Plan B by whispering to yourself  ‘if only…’, or ‘I want more…’ or ‘that’s it…’

Whenever you’re cradling Plan B, you’re not present to your relationship. You have one foot in, and one foot out the door running towards a mirage. A part of you is absent.

Are you ready to share your secret, and tell your partner about Plan B?

How sometimes you imagine living on your own again. How you worry sitting by the bedside of your sleeping child, that you might not be up to the task of parenting. Or that you long to rekindle a tenderness that used to be there but now seems atrophied somehow.

For as long as it lasts, true comittment doesn’t house a secret lover.

Your child’s gift holds the family together

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What sets every family member apart is what holds the family together.

This is an old ancestral understanding. The strength of our relationships grows from our willingness to honor, celebrate and cultivate our differences.

Every child has a unique gift, talent, passion that complements the gifts of others. These are the variegated threads of a vibrant community.

Skokomish tribal leader, Gerald Bruce Miller says it like this: “Don’t teach your children all the same thing. If you teach them the same thing, they won’t need each other and the world will fall apart.”

Diversity fosters interdependence. Uniformity unravels the web.

One-liners: parenting in a single sentence

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“It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.”

My son spoke this sentence today. We were stuck with the car in an icy ditch. Foolishly, I had tried to reverse uphill on a crust of compacted snow and rain. There was a lot for me to learn here (and model too!).

He’s heard me speak that exact sentence a dozen if not hundreds of times in his little life. It’s a one-liner we often use in our family.

You’ll have some one-liners yourself, I’m sure. Take a moment to think about a few. What do you say again and again in certain situations?

Here are a few common ones: “Practice makes perfect”; “Don’t cry over spilled milk”; “Easy come, easy go.”

You may or may not agree with these. Perhaps they underscore values that are different from yours. But whatever you consider an essential teaching for your child, make sure you can boil it down to a single sentence. With a handful of one-liners, you can then drip-feed your core family teachings throughout childhood.

Redundancy emphasizes importance.