Right from day one whenever anything has gone well with our parenting it has felt like a bit of an accident. Conversely, when things go badly or wrong, it has felt like we are failing or sabotaging ourselves by not doing something right – what though is anyone’s guess!
Tag: parenting
Inner Voices
Your inner voice is an important part of your personality. It is the thing which makes you question yourself, allows you to make decisions, and most importantly tells you what the consequences of any action you are about to take might be. Young children do not have an inner voice, or at least not a developed one. It is quite common for children who have been in care to have an underdeveloped inner voice for their age. This can in part be because of a lack of communication skills; if they lack good language skills how can they create that
Calming the Storm
Patience. It isn’t necessarily a quality I would attribute to myself. Not without some internal effort at least. I can sit and stare at a problem on my computer, methodically looking through hundreds of lines of code, attempting to identify a bug and fix it. It can take seconds, minutes, hours, or sometimes days to do that. I can do this where others may not. This is where my patience holds. I do not have patience with people, at least I never thought so, but occasionally I surprise myself. When patience is the last thing on my mind, but is
Who is the Soft Touch?
We recently got asked this question, it was one we couldn’t actually answer with any certainty, and it got me thinking about why we had no response. Which one of you do your children go to if they want something? Who gives in more easily? Who is the soft touch? They’re all pretty much the same question, and our answer is neither of us and both of us. We were in a meeting with a few other adoptive parents and a social worker and the question came up while talking about our children. The consensus around the table was that
The Things We Lose
Many of the freedoms that we have as adults get compromised when we become parents. That is true regardless of how you become a parent. This isn’t something to complain about, it is something that any parent should expect, but that doesn’t mean we can’t miss them and, if I’m being brutally honest, resent their loss just a little. One thing that we, as adoptive parents, don’t get to choose is how much we share about our children on social media. We aren’t able to post videos of their first steps, or photos of the complete state they get into
The Stranger Hypocrisy
We always do our best not to be hypocritical when enforcing rules with our children. Lead by example is the policy we try to follow, but this can be quite difficult in some circumstances.
Parenting Cycles
We all do it. We tell ourselves we will never be like our parents, we’ll do things differently, we’ll do things better.
The Parenting Anxiety
I am a worrier. There are no two ways about it. I am the kind of person that attempts to think through every single scenario of a given situation and come up with a plan to cope with it. I lose sleep over it, I get migraines because of it, I even sometimes end up avoiding the given situation because of some bizarre scenario I have come up with that I can’t find a way of resolving. The more unknowns the worse I am.
