One of the greatest gifts of our human culture is raising our babies in community. And if we are very lucky we raise our children surrounded by diverse family make-ups, varieties of ages and ethnic groups, different ways of raising children and different ideas of how to parent. By simply being human we get to grow and be influenced by all the people that surround us.
So, it isn’t surprising that one of the parenting questions I hear most often is:
“We are raising our children with these principles and ideals but our parents/siblings/friends interact with our children completely counter to our values. How do we help our parents/siblings/friends use our way with our children?”
From years of co-raising children with a variety of families I can tell you that every family raises their children in different ways than I use in my classroom and in a different way than in my home environment. Sometimes it drives me bonkers that parents just won’t listen to what I have to tell them, but I have come to learn three very important things about raising our children in our global community of human beings and have grown so much from working with families with diverse values.
Every person (save the very minor few), want to do best by your children. They want to show your children that they love them, they want your children to be happy and to grow into amazing people. Every person is doing the best they can with the tools that they have, the way they were raised and their own human experience. As soon as you can understand this you can see that love overrides anything that may be bothering you about how they interact with your child.
You can never change a person, a person has to want to change. There is no better way to encourage a change than to model the behaviour you want to see. The only way a person can know there is a different way to do something is to see that difference in action. So LIVE your parenting choices and your family values, show them to everyone around you, be proud of your decisions and model how you parent and raise your family. Over time, the people that see the benefit of the way you parent will change and the people that don’t, won’t, and that’s ok.
Every family, every person is on their own path through life. What values you have as a family will not be the same as your neighbours, friends or siblings. When my child asks why their friend gets dessert every day and we don’t let I let them know that our family values are different than theirs and that’s ok. If you are strong in your family values it is so much easier to respect other’s family values. It is easier to be ok that they are different, to live without judgement and to enjoy the differences. It may mean that when your children are at grandma’s house they watch tv and go on candy scavenger hunts, while at home you don’t have a television and are sugar free. But that is ok. You have rooted your child in your family values so a short time living someone else’s values isn’t going to change that, in fact, it will help your child to see that different houses, different family members, different friends live differently.
And how lucky is that, that our children get to experience people living differently and then get to come home to the safety of their family - the largest influence in their growth. Living in our human community allows for variety, and grows robust humans ready to respect different values and ideas. It allows our children to experience different things and decide what they like, what resonates with them. And you are always there, the safe parents, ready to love, model and share your own family values with them.