In the beginning, there was just you and your partner. You might have talked about becoming parents, but you had time to do the jobs that needed to be done at your home and maybe even had some time left over to be a do-gooder in the community.
But now you have a child.
There is no time to even finish one task at home because there is something that needs to be done. My son and his wife, now parents to two children, aged 2 and three months, talk about the ‘plan’. He says it used to be a plan about dreams, their future and what they would like to do yet in the world.
Now, however, the plan might include what is for the next meal and who will be in charge of the oldest while the youngest gets a bath. It is time to…..
Think critically. I know, you can find everything you need to know by googling. Or by reading a current book on parenting. But don’t overlook the importance of thinking critically…especially…with the other parent. Good critical thinkers reframe the problem to get to the bottom of things. “Why isn’t the two year old eating?” Are we offering foods that have too much flavor…like stuffed peppers or spicy chorizo? Or, maybe the sitter is feeding this little girl too close to dinner time. We might very well come up with very different answers to fix the problem if we consider which of these is causing the problem of why a two year old isn’t eating dinner. Now you need to….
Decide. At some point you have enough information about the problem and just need to take a stand to determine if your reasoning is good enough. Ask the sitter to withhold snacks after two p.m. and see if it makes a difference. Offer food that is simple to hold and simple to eat and see if it makes a difference. It is important for parents to realize that obtaining consensus is rare. Lots of opinions can create even more confusion when we are trying to help a two year old with a problem. So you might want to….
Learn. We all learn through successes and failures. You have to keep trying because the problems of parenting keep changing. When you figure out how to feed your two year old, they will turn 2 and a half or three and their feeding problems will morph into new and different problems which will require new and different solutions. But life moves by pretty fast and really great parents learn to….
Anticipate. Just like good leaders, good parents learn how to anticipate the needs of their children to ‘head them off at the pass’. Whether you are trying to get them fed before there is a meltdown or recognizing that you need to get a meal in before other jobs that need to be accomplished like baths or laundry, you will need to anticipate your child’s needs.
It is always good to have a plan. Maybe it was good to have those discussions about your long term plans before you had children. Those discussions helped you learn how to plan so you could figure out how to get two children out of car seats at the end of the day and into the house. Your plans will help you learn to be better parents and before you know it, those day to day plans will surprise you with eighteen year old children and a wealth of parenting knowledge.
