Navigating the Wonky Road of Parenting: Enlist a Support Squad All Along the Way

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Review the introduction to this blog series: Manageable Doses of Advice for Parents

Review Part 1: Considering Screen Time (even though we don’t want to)

Review Part 2: Hope for Preventing and Reducing Anxiety in Children

My husband, Bruce, and I would never have made it home from the hospital with our first baby if we had not gathered an informal parenting consultation team, and that team has only grown. Being vulnerable about your need for parenting support takes courage and can feel risky. It can be hard to stay focused on the right things when the bizzy-body parent brigade and the mom-splainers in your community spray down all of their friends and followers with the image of seamless parenting. There are also parents in every sphere who just can’t help themselves from doing science projects for their kids, cleaning like fiends to scratch their itches and maintain the appearance of perfection, and constantly climbing into their kids’ soup to assist in academic and athletic achievements. Let’s just say there are land mines to avoid out in the wilds of interactions with other parents. 

Once aware of parent culture in your circle, a key survival move is to actively find people who aren’t gunning to seem like they have parenting fully dialed in. One or two play groups or parent gatherings will filter out your people, but it requires some weeding. Dive into conversations and keep your radar out for the parents who can find some humor in the madness of it all and aren’t clamoring to impress. You will find them because authenticity is a magnet for authenticity. A more challenging step is to embrace imperfectionism and the glitchiness of your own parenting. This could be the most freeing choice of your life as a parent. Of course, we are all “doing the best we can with what we’ve got,” but parenting is a shoddy operation. Forge on with gusto and keep aiming while also forgiving yourselves. Talking to a therapist regularly can help you learn to let some things go and trust that your child will be just fine. 

I was the righteously schleppy mom with the lint-covered fleece top, dirty old sneakers, and disheveled hair. It was a low-key public service, but sometimes it wasn’t quite enough to inspire my friends to lower their bar. A number of high-maintenance friends offered unsolicited makeover tips – good folks who wanted to help me. I was (am!) admittedly an enemy of fashion, and luckily unfazed by appearance interventions. Many parents get trapped in the loop of comparison and self-loathing around the appearance of their homes, their kids’ achievements, and even the cars they drive. Our kids cringed when their friends’ parents would express concern about them driving cars with missing hubcaps, dents, and various parts held on with duct tape or wire. We were (are?) a gift for the community with our funky old Inn, awesomely well-rounded regular kids, and clunker cars.

A few tips Bruce and I lived by to survive and occasionally thrive. Full credit goes to Vicki Hoefle (author of The Straight Talk on Parenting) whose work brought the parenting joy up tenfold: 

  • Stay off the school portal as much as possible and forget your password
  • Enencourage kids by asking them specific questions about their experiences so they can learn to self-assess, rather than “good-jobbing” them into becoming praise junkies.
  • Give kids daily responsibilities and chores around the house to help them develop independent skills and life skills (and avoid being an irritating roommate or partner)
  • Allow them to fumble and stumble by letting them climb, jump, build, cook, and try new things; this will help them feel more courageous and capable even if they make double batches of manky cookies that end up in the garbage

My all-time low-bar gift almost brought tears of gratitude to a friend’s eyes. Despite standing in our imperfect home with mismatched furniture, she was fawning over how much I was juggling in my life and “keeping it all together.” She asked how I did it, so I pointed out my grubby outfit and invited her to follow me for a “this-is-how-we-do-it” tour. I assumed the sight of our most clutter-filled and neglected room – the unsettlingly messy “nerve center” as Bruce calls it, aka the office/playroom/gear storage/family room – would prove the point. Nope. So I took her to our bedroom where it was clear we lived out of laundry baskets despite three functional bureaus. I could only see a glimmer of her feeling convinced, so I presented the most hideous aspect of our home – the family toilet. We are innkeepers who regularly cleaned ten toilets but pulled up short and didn’t clean our own. It was such a wretchedly dirty toilet that she gasped with overwhelming gratitude. She was convinced! 

Soon after, our kids were put in charge of the family bathroom cleaning. Fifteen years later, they are out in the world forcing us to bring up our empty nest toilet-cleaning game, but the bar is still low. Paid tours are available to make you feel better. Pat yourself on the back, imagining what a slacker I am and how much closer you are to being Marie Kondo and Martha Stewart than I. You’re welcome. 

My whole point is that social media can be a deep hole of creating feelings of inadequacy, but some funny people have content that aims to make parents feel better and help them gain perspective. @bigtimeadulting is one. Caitlin Murray makes thousands of us feel better about our parenting with Big Time Adulting. She will remind us that we are right on target as a parent and a human, slays the truth, swears effectively, and tells us to get ourselves a snack. Bless her! @thedumbdads is another. Kevin Laferriere and Evan Berger take on a variety of common situations that rattles parents and demonstrate them from hilarious angles with @thedumbdads. Set a timer when you open Instagram because you could get lost in these videos.

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