Parenting

Disclosure: I am not a parent. I’ve never been a parent that I know of.

I never figured out how that worked.

I am a child of a parent so this is just my point-of-view. This is not intended as a Do-It-Yourself instructional manual but one person’s history.

Parenting, from what I’ve read in history, was the teaching and training of a baby created by a man and a woman. Back in the day the parents were responsible for teaching basic skills like pooping training and how to eat without assistance. Good parenting taught how to tie your shoes, comb your hair and how to make your bed.

When parenting was the only training, the girls would be shown how to sew and cook and sweep the floors by the mother while the guys followed their dads out into the fields to cut wood, bale hey and learn the complexity of tractors.

Parents also were supposed to teach speaking or at least some form of verbal communication with family slang and colloquialisms. At the same time they were taught their parents biases and prejudices, whether intended or not.

Then public schooling took over the chore of teaching the children how to read and rite and rithmetic. Your child was taught obedience to a stranger who was smarter than your parents. The responsibility for your child to write their name, read a financial contract or balance a bankbook falls to the school. Today the school system is over burdened with everything from mental evaluation to policing violence.

For the kids who show enough smarts to avoid the factory or fieldwork were sent to university or higher learning to be exposed to philosophy, psychology, sociology, animosity, amorously, and more with the freedom to cogitate their own thoughts.

I was lucky enough to only fail one year and with a series of summer school retraining, made it through all the expected schooling and got a piece of paper but not sure I was much smarter.

I did know how to write my name enough to sign a marriage certificate, bank loans, mortgage contract, divorce papers and everything else people put in front of me to ‘sign on the line’ though my scribble of today is nowhere near as neat as I was taught.

So what about all that other stuff?

My parents were not keen at helping with homework so I just put it to the side and watched television instead, probably a reason for my good grades? My mother did buy a subscription to the World Book Encyclopedias (the first Google) from a traveling salesman but it was out-of-date by the time out of the box.

I did go to all the classes and got good attendance ribbons but wasn’t paying attention. I would have skipped school but everyone I knew was in school so I just followed the crowd. That is how we were trained.

Writing lead me into drawing which lead me into a career, but reading was another matter. English was easy enough with ‘Dick and Jane’ but I didn’t read enough to understand dangling participles, as you know if you have read any of this blog. Arithmetic was easy pass the flash cards because there were formulas that later helped when computers came cheap enough to buy. Unfortunately math did not help with balancing a bankbook.

What about the rest of the stuff that makes your life interesting?

I was never interested in sports. Dodge ball meant getting hit with a ball and football meant getting knocked down and basketball meant running back and forth on a wooden floor so I migrated more to softer sports like tennis and golf. Unfortunately not as many had the access to country clubs so without much pushing from my parents, faded from my interest.

Manly training, formally the assignment of the father, was passed to the Boy Scouts or Summer Camp that taught sharpening knives or camping or shooting arrows or guns. Sailing, fishing, water skiing, scuba diving, surfing were all taught outside of parental observation or participation.

I learned to dance at summer camp. Imagine a bunch of boys doing the cha-cha to a record player, but the reward was a Saturday Night Barn dance with the girl’s camp.

Being a water baby, I always seem buoyant in the water and learned how to survive in the ocean by trial and error. After being told I had to know certain strokes to swim in the deep end of the pool, I think my brother taught me or maybe it was someone else in the family to kick my feet. After a friend of mine drowned when we were swimming together, I took it seriously joining the swimming team at the club and even a lifeguard.

My mother always handled first aid training. She was the one to kiss my boo-boo with a band-aid or fed me soup and crackers when sick. She was the one who took me to the hospital to get parts removed or be sewn up. The training did not extend to the knowledge of the doctor cost.

Moral direction was assigned to the weekly meetings at the church to provide faith and ethics without answering my questions. The rest of belief structure was taught by friends and foes that I encountered through life.

Understanding right from wrong and the consequences of punishment, I don’t recall. If I was ever whooped, I don’t remember. I never had my mouth washed out but do remember an event where I mouthed off at a passing car and got pushed around and my basketball trashed by a bunch of bigger boys. Lesson learned.

Learning to drive was from the public school system program and a few test-drives through the neighborhood with my mother before filling out the form and getting my card. Both cars were always being used so I didn’t have that much access to them, but when I was given a chance to drive to the store and get a quart of milk, I took advantage of it.

The rest of it was ‘learn as you go’ as everyone does for there is no instruction manual to living. Everyone does it differently.

Will this be on the test?