Parenting lessons can be learned by listening to children

There are so many times when children say or do things that inadvertently or intentionally help adults navigate challenging terrain.

I recall two such pivotal instances of my own.

In the first, I am desperate to finish Chapter 2 of my dissertation. I realize I need further research materials, but any visit to the University of Manitoba library will involve a seven-hour round trip by car from Fisher River Cree Nation, where we live.

I bargain with my three-year-old. He will go to a YMCA drop-in daycare near the university. They have a pool. He likes water. I will go to the library. I promise my swift return to the daycare, a happy ride home, even an ice cream.

An affable fellow, especially fond of adults, he seems to agree. I hold much of my breath, for it is a lot to ask of a little boy. Still, I think it can work.

My son is dropped off.

I hit the stacks.

Within the hour, arms book-full, I am found by a university librarian advising a message has been received from the daycare staff: they have attempted to get my son into the pool; he has vehemently proclaimed he cannot because he has his period.

He is unsoothable.

I am to recover him immediately.

I drop the books and find him a little worse for wear but, with juice and cracker in hand, relieved, even somewhat bemused. While he is cheerful during the car ride home, I, at wits’ end, accept my library plan as utterly untenable. My son’s response is well-founded: he has never been to a daycare, doesn’t know what a library is, has never seen a university and has never been dropped off anywhere.

In the second instance, years later with two boys living in Winnipeg, I accept a fall, full-time teaching offer, but need time to prepare during the summer. I conceive my childcare plan: the eldest, at nine, will do a sports-camp university program. Though he thinks sports foreign, unnecessary, if not irrational, he agrees to go. The youngest, at five, will attend a nearby summer day camp. He also seems agreeable.

We achieve Day 1. The eldest, while still perplexed by the focus on sports, remains committed. The youngest, however, says he cannot return to the day camp. He takes my face gently in his hands and says he has something very important to tell me. They have lined the children up according to some kind of ability and marched them off to a playing field. He doesn’t understand what criteria placed him at the end of a line. He is both ashamed and fearful.

He asks me to listen to him, to understand.

Discombobulated, the eldest feels his brother has no right to refuse and must honour his initial promise. I listen. I have been raised with a logic that coerced me into doing many things designed — my parents advised — “for my own good.” Though I adore our family cottage in the woods by a magical river, for example, I am sent off to a sleepover summer camp into what seems frightening territory. Part of my parents’ incentive involves their hope that I will return thinner.

I do not.

I wonder how much I have relied on that “for your own good” teaching while raising my boys. I look at the youngest. He is desperate and sincere. He is still holding my face gently in his hands.

I review teachings that tell children they simply have to take risks and go with the flow because there will be benefits they will understand and value when they are older.

I think about all the other mothers I know whose children welcome summer camp. I wonder: do I spoil this youngest son by not pushing him more? What if he never finds his independence? What if I have simply babied him and he remains risk-averse?

And then I wonder: what if I risk not respecting his limits? What if I do not question the teachings I have received about maintaining a stiff upper lip because a parent knows best? What if I do not understood risk and resilience as a two-way street between parent and child requiring ongoing revision — a balancing of authority and compassion, rule and compromise, expectation and reconsideration.

I call a friend with a teenage daughter footloose for the summer who accepts my offer of a four-week childminding job. Listening and learning, we find our way into September.

Even now, when I flounder — when past “chin-up” training interferes with my best intention to hear and see my now-grown sons’ inclinations — they respond, generously and with mirth, reminding me that given the transformative parent-child stories we continue to recount together, I might trust them to discover, with me and in conversation, what’s best.