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.

Planning family-time before anything else

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Work comittments easily take precedence over family-time.

Not without conflict though. Someone in the family will eventually feel left out, or ignored, or excluded.

If communication is unclear, there might be anger or withdrawal. Or, god forbid, the leaden cloak of supressed anger.

Let’s bring our family-time back to the center of our lives.

Here’s one way: once a week, sit down and go through the calendar together as a family. See when in the coming week you want to set aside time for the family, or when there are shared obligations to attend to.

When those times are agreed on and blocked out, you’ll know what remains available for work.

Ask your child for help to find the time to parent

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I was supporting a father the other week, and after an intense, surprising and creative session with some out-of-the-box prescriptions for change, he paused and in a slow voice he said, “I just need to find the time for this.”

I immediately asked: “Where will you look?” He paused a long time before conceding that he didn’t know where to find that additional morsel of time that would make all the difference to his family life.

We all labour under the curious burden of not having enough time. It’s the one thing in our lives that seems to get heavier the less of it we seem to have. It might be better that we do away with it all together. We could collapse the future, the past and the present into the now.

Sounds unrealistic, naive, weird? Then take a moment and look to your child for some magic.

Our children are constantly asking us to come to them–be with them–to settle into the now. In so many creative ways they appeal to us to slow down, to play, to discover, to wonder at the mystery of it all. Our children seem to have all the time in the world. It seems they know where to find it.

You too can turn the tide on time, and snuggle up to a new narrative. Here’s one radical way: Make yourself a fine clock out of cardboard, with paper hands to set the hours and minutes. Place it prominently in your kitchen or hallway.

The next time your child asks you to do something together, and you hear yourself say that you don’t have the time, create some magic. Turn the minute hand back 10 minutes, no more.

And then this: during those ten minutes, see and do everything as if it’s the first time. Even better, do something for the first time ever. It doesn’t matter how odd it might seem. Never worn a potted plant on your head? This is the time to try it. Ever danced naked with your child to loud music? Now is the time.

When we seek out newness, our world slows down.

Do this, or something else that’s radically new for you, and you’ll suddenly find some of the time you thought was lost forever.

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Nothing is good for a child’s growth

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Every child needs a healthy dose of nothing to do.

Nothing germinates their imagination, cultivates their delight, develops their relationship to self. Nothing gifts them with the discovery that their selves hold an infinity of world’s within worlds. Nothing teaches them something about life that nothing else can do.

Too much to do, too many activities, too early in life, risks distracting them from this natural growth.

It’s paradoxical, that as a father or mother we’re actually doing something by doing nothing. It’s so easy to fear that we’re not doing enough as parents. It’s easy to worry our child is falling behind. We compare ourselves to others. We sign our kid up for more lessons, classes, events, tasks. We hand him another screen, toy, book.

Stop. Don’t. Relax, and practice the art of nothing.

Spend an evening side-by-side. Light a fire in the woods and hang out. Sit by the shore and watch the waves lap the land.

Let the hours flow. Be alone together.

Robert Bly says it like this, in his poem For my son Noah ten years old

Night and day arrive and day after day goes by
And what is old remains old and what is young remains young and grows old.
The lumber pile does not grow younger nor the two-by-fours lose their darkness
but the old tree goes on the barn stands without help so many years;
the advocate of darkness and night is not lost.

The horse steps up swings on one leg turns its body
the chicken flapping claws onto the roost its wings whelping and walloping
but what is primitive is not to be shot out into the night and the dark.
And slowly the kind man comes closer loses his rage sits down at table.

So I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness
when you sit drawing or making books stapled with messages to the world
or coloring a man with fire coming out of his hair.
Or we sit at a table with small tea carefully poured.
So we pass our time together calm and delighted.

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Time for yourself

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The arrival of a baby changes all relationships, including our relationship with time.

Our days, and hearts, reorganize to tend to this new, tender life.

One day we feel a tinge of panic, and realize we are losing our autonomy. We have hardly any time for ourselves.

Listen to that tinge and take it seriously. Verbalize your need for respite, and share it with your partner.

Speak it. Ask for it. Plan for it. And enjoy it too.

 

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