This short week has certainly been a crazy one and it’s showed me one important thing: parenting is all about finding balance.
But I’m not talking about balancing parenthood in the traditional sense of making sure everything gets done in life, though I could certainly write about that, too, as I physically balance my exhausted infant who got woken from his nap too early while also trying to type out a blog post, help my girls with their school work and make sure my active toddler who likes to jump on everything doesn’t get hurt.
But the part of balancing parenthood I’ve been experiencing this week is one of how to properly support my children in their growth and development while also giving them the opportunity to figure things out on their own. Basically, how much help is too much and how much is just enough? And how the heck do I know?!?!
One of my former co-teachers from Oklahoma shared this article yesterday about letting children naturally develop their motor skills without teaching them or showing them how to sit, stand, walk, climb, etc. And while this has always been my philosophy on the playground (yes, I’m the mom that sits on the bench and watches and the one that actually encourages my kids to go UP the slide), it’s been harder for me when it comes to social and cognitive development.
I’ve always taken a “let them work it out themselves” approach to social development. I encourage them to answer questions posed by strangers, ask for things they want on their own and to interact with other kids at the park. But I also don’t force them to interact if they’re not up for it.
And sometimes I have to intervene like when Doodle hit another little boy at the girls’ gymnastics class yesterday or when the girls get too wild and rough and they are headed towards someone getting hurt. But what about instances like right now where Doodle is sitting by the bathroom door and Sugarplum is demanding potty privacy. Do I need to intervene? No one is going to get hurt and Sugarplum is just whining, no one is screaming. But it’s been going for close to 5 minutes.
Then there’s out homeschooling. My main goal has always been to develop autonomous, eager learners. I want my children to love learning and be responsible for completing their work.
But they’re not there yet and I constantly have to remind them it’s a school day or that they haven’t finished their work for the week. And it becomes exhausting. At what point do I just give up on the nagging and let them not do their work?
I love the idea of “unschooling” and letting kids learn what they want when they want but I’m also not convinced it would work for our family and getting my children where I want them to go in life. So I remind them of what they need to do and encourage them to work independently and choose to do school on their own but they often need my prodding to get it done.
But where I’ve struggled the most lately is with teaching them new concepts and skills. Sugarplum has come a long way with reading but is very stubborn about reading with me. She will rarely read to me and even when I convince her to, she often refuses to try to sound out words that I know she can figure out. So sometimes I “help” her with the letter sounds (even though she is more than capable of doing it herself) and she still sometimes won’t say the word even when I’m 99% sure she’s figured it out.
And Honeybun has a tendency to shutdown when things don’t make sense (like when she learned regrouping/carrying in subtraction last year). So I try to guide her to the answers without giving it away. I try to say it different ways and encourage different ways to think about it but oftentimes she just won’t. She gets frustrated and refuses to try and I can see her thoughts going to “I can’t do this. This is too hard. I don’t like this. This is stupid. I hate homeschool” instead of trying to problem solve the work she’s doing.
And these behaviors make me frustrated because I don’t want to give in and just tell them the answer but it is also exhausting to constantly struggle with them and encourage them with no results. It would be so much easier to just give them all the answers but what would that teach them?
So I go around and around, back and forth, constantly trying to figure out how to balance giving them enough information without giving them all the answers. Balancing how to give them enough support without completely carrying them. Balancing how to encourage them without frustrating them.
Balancing parenthood is certainly not an easy task no matter which way you look at it. And here I am again, attempting to balance my (still) exhausted newborn who was woken up too early from his nap (again) while also trying to finish up this blog post, help my girls with school and prevent my toddler from getting hurt by driving his sisters crazy who may overreact at any minute!
