All things in life have a time and a season, including life itself. How’s that for a cheerful entry! But it’s true, and it isn’t inherently a negative thing to lose things to which we are attached, even our own life. It’s very natural and healthy to mourn losses. But it’s detrimental to remain so attached to things we lose that we cannot find happiness in new circumstances. We all know this, yet it is so much easier said than done. And it works both ways: good times end, but so do challenging times. We don’t get to pick and choose; we just ride with life as best as we can. And that brings us to this post’s topic: the rewards of parenting!
If you have kids, you remain a parent forever, but you actively parent (as a verb) while they are minors in your care (and perhaps also while they are young adults in college, settling into independence). The minor years, especially early childhood, is the life stage we’ll discuss here. This season, regardless of the monumental depth of living it brings, is alarmingly temporary. And the challenging times can feel like eternity. Yet, while it has its challenges, the rewards of parenting are unexpectedly powerful and make every moment worth whatever struggles we face.
Instant Hot Seat
Parents don’t get a trial run. We don’t get a ‘take-home-baby-doll’ from the hospital that not only cries to be fed but also magically grows into toddlers with robot-powered toddler minds. We don’t get two years into our child’s life only to say, ‘well I should have done this or that differently so let’s start over again.’ Our child is ours forever, and there is no true parenting practice beforehand. The only exceptions are foster parents and legal guardians of non-biological children. The rest of us go home from the hospital on day two or three and are told, ‘good luck!’ Now, yes, we hopefully receive plenty of support from the community, family, and friends. But nobody else is in our exact role night after night, week after week. In this way, we are equals with our baby: baby is brand new, and we as parents are brand new!
The Dreaded Parent Guilt
I think a lot of ‘mom guilt’ (or dad guilt) comes from the fact that we don’t do things exactly as we think we should. Many people experience pressure from others, whether real or imagined. But often times, our regret stems from not meeting our own parenting standards. It is important to have healthy standards. But we are human, and we cannot be perfect. So grace is warranted when we make mistakes. Yes, it is important to rectify mistakes to the best of our ability. But then we need to let them go and reflect on what we learned.
A valuable program I joined taught how important it is to identify and release age-old guilt. We often don’t even know we carry it. But at the end of the day, it’s useless to keep mentally punishing ourselves for mistakes that we have already long-since learned from. As long as we learned something from our mistakes, it is high time to move on. And while we can’t go back and change the past (because parenting is no trial run, after all!), we can move forward with what we’ve learned and continue to do our best. And that is enough! By actively doing and being our best for our children, we are not only blessing them but powerfully role-modeling healthy leadership.
Time Slows Down, Time Speeds Up
As they say, the nights are long but the years are short. You blink and they’re five. You blink and they’re fifteen. Nothing we can do about that! But we can slow down to be present for each moment, however mundane it may seem. Any moment with our child is anything but mundane. Our minds may be less impressed with all the new input our children process, but their elastic minds are firing all over the place and just fascinated with every little thing. By being present with them for the small moments, we honor where they are in life and disregard the ticking clock. We just connect in the present moment. This is something I work on regularly, because it doesn’t come naturally. I am so achievement oriented, often to the detriment of honoring the present moment. So I am writing what I am working out myself.
Our Greatest Teachers
Your child is your greatest teacher. He teaches you how to be patient again and again and again. She is your greatest coach. Coaches (and babies) yell and scream at us and push us beyond our limits. He is your greatest personal trainer. He challenges you to stretch yourself, every single day (and he quite literally provides the dead weight to physically train!). Your child is your greatest cheerleader. She adores you like none other and you are the world to her. The things we do, the changes we go through for our children – all of it is a testament to how incredibly powerful and amazing the rewards of parenting are. Nothing compares.
Sometimes it takes a child to really get ourselves together. Prior to having my son, I had a lifetime’s worth of unprocessed troubles and trauma that repeatedly impacted the way I live my life. You think you move on from something – you go to university, you get great work experience, you travel, you have so many friends, and you grow as a person. But when we don’t know how to truly resolve something, we are unlikely to force ourselves to sit and examine age-old crap. Until suddenly, we have a child! And every trigger and every button is pushed, so that we must finally get our crap together.
Conscious Parenting
I highly recommend Mihaela Plugarasu’s book Conscious Parenting of Your Toddler: Strategies To Turn Discipline into Growth and Connection. I realized early on in my son’s life that I needed to truly address some of my own baggage in order to be a better person for him – to be a better parent and role model. Even if you don’t have kids, this book is a true eye-opener and teaches you about yourself. We have to examine ourselves and heal and nurture our own issues in order to lovingly handle all of the challenges we face as parents (or as babysitters or childcare providers). It’s about parenting ourselves as well as our children.
Parenting ourselves involves getting the support and self-care that we need to compassionately resolve our own baggage. It helps us to truly view challenges through a new lens. I deal with tantrums nearly every day, but they don’t have to be the anxiety-provoking experiences they seem to be. Learning to understand my innate response to situations and to understand what’s really going on in my toddler’s mind is truly a game changer and helps set a much more positive and empowering mindset. This is one of the greatest rewards of parenting: become a more patient and compassionate individual. And this also impacts all other relationships.
Enjoying the Rewards of Parenting: Spontaneous Joys and Surprises
When we learn from our challenges, we naturally grow into more relaxed and capable individuals. We’ll never be perfect and there will always be more to learn, but we build upon our growth and wisdom and gain an appreciation for our own progress. We accept ourselves and our limitations, continuing to graciously work with them. And so setbacks aren’t full-blown crises where we question our parenting capacity or the future of our child. They’re just learning experiences, and we go forward with confidence and hope. We have more space to appreciate the good things, of which there are plenty! When we aren’t so preoccupied with what we are doing wrong, we are way more likely to notice all of our blessings and the proof that we are doing something right.
A child’s joy is the most contagious thing. Of all the rewards of parenting, this is the gold. What parent hasn’t basked in the glow of pride and adoration for so many seemingly mundane things our children do? They mean the world to us! And so when we witness their true joy and delight over any small thing, we are filled with joy on their behalf. We cheer them on and celebrate them every single day (and many of us take a ridiculous amount of photos from our mobile phones).
Children’s Delight and Pride in Learning a New Skill
Even non-parents can’t resist the true joy of a child. I’m a Candace Bushnell fan and recently read one of her latest books, Is There Still Sex in the City (the television series is filming at this time). Bushnell explains how she never wanted children and was never a ‘baby person’ like the other girls in her neighbourhood. Of course, like other people who choose to not have children, she still appreciates and cares for them. But she explains that she has never had the ‘maternal instinct’.
When her old friend and his son from Iceland came to visit her home in the Hamptons, she did her best to make the trip a success. As often happens with any houseguest who lives a markedly different lifestyle from our own (the father), she ended up feeling a little inconvenienced after several changes of plans that interrupted her work schedule. Always a trooper, though, Bushnell rolled with the punches and did what she could to help make the visit a fun one for the boy. She was feeling deflated and wasn’t sure whether he had an ounce of fun at all until the day he learned to ride a bicycle. Once he got this new skill, he was elated. And as she explained, that was all it took:
‘And the smile on his face. I could say it stretched from ear to ear, but it was more than that. It was the smile that makes it all worth it. All the mess, the fuss, the inconvenience of having to feed, clothe, entertain, shepherd, and most of all think obsessively about a small person. When you see the look of joy on a kid’s face that tells you that they get it – there’s nothing like it. You know you’ve lived.’
Candace Bushnell, Is There Still Sex in the City, p. 179
The Takeaway: Enjoy Life’s Surprises on Your Parenting Journey
Parenting is incredibly difficult, to be sure. It challenges us, stretches us, and ages us (quite literally!). But it is also incredibly rewarding, and so worth every inconvenience beyond compare. The rewards of parenting span the years of living together, loving together, teaching together, crying together, and growing together. We are privileged to be leaders of small humans. Whatever your religion or spiritual beliefs, God/the universe has destined that you have what it takes to raise a child. So no matter where you’ve been and what mistakes you’ve made, you can go forward in confidence that you can parent well and enjoy it at that.