Parenting Excerpts

Many Ways to Say I Love You by Fred Rogers

Reprinted with permission from Hyperion Publishing.

Parents don’t come full bloom at the birth of their first baby. In fact, parenting is about growing. It’s about our own growing as much as our children’s growing, and that kind of growing happens little by little.

It’s tempting to think “a little” isn’t significant and that only “a lot” matters. But most things that are important in life start very small and change very slowly, and they don’t come with fanfare and bright lights.

*           *           *

For all parents, the birth of a child means that life will never be the same again, and each new child forces changes and reorderings of old relationships. Our pleasures and pains are now bound up in someone else’s life, someone else’s needs, experiences, feelings, triumphs, and misfortunes, and bound more closely than they ever have been before.

*           *           *

Our children are richer when we let them know that we, even as adults, want to grow, too, and that we hope to keep growing all our lives.

*           *           *

While some challenges our children face may make us anxious, they also present us with one of the great opportunities of parenting – the chance to resolve these lingering anxieties of our own. That’s why I often say that “children offer us another chance to grow.” Going through an experience with your child that was once frightening to you when you were a child allows you to find ways to comfort not only your own son or daughter, but also the child that has remained within yourself. You’re an adult now and you can use your adult perspective to make a difference in your children’s present and your own past.

*           *           *

The relationship a parent has with a first-born is different than with any subsequent children. That difference is natural, but it can sometimes make a parent feel guilty. The birth of a first child is the birth of parenthood for that child’s mother and father. As new parents, they suddenly open the door for all kinds of new learning – not only about their baby, but also about parts of themselves they thought were long forgotten.

*           *           *

Being a parent is a complex thing. It involves trying to feel what our children are feeling and trying to know just how much to do to help them with what they cannot yet do for themselves. It involves understanding the differences between sympathy and empathy.

Doing just enough for somebody so that person can grow and do all that he or she is capable of doing – that’s a large order.

*           *           *

I received a letter from a parent who wrote: “Mister Rogers, how do you do it? I wish I were like you. I want to be patient and quiet and even-tempered, and always speak respectfully to my children. But that just isn’t my personality. I often lose my patience and even scream at my children. I want to change from an impatient person into a patient person, from an angry person into a gentle one.”

Just as it takes time for children to understand what real love is, it takes time for parents to understand that being always patient, quiet, even-tempered, and respectful isn’t necessarily what “good” parents are. In fact, parents help children by expressing a wide range of feelings – including appropriate anger. All children need to see that the adults in their lives can feel anger and not hurt themselves or anyone else when they feel that way.

*           *           *

When a baby is born, parents often feel that they would like to give that baby a perfect life. It’s a very natural feeling, but of course not a very realistic one, especially if “perfection” to those parents means “no trouble, no tears, no fights, constant providing for every need, every minute.” Every parent soon discovers that kind of perfection is far from possible (even if it were desirable). Nighttime feedings and diaper changes and stomach pains and growing pains and jealousies and all the rest enter the picture very early and parents are forced to realize, often sadly, that the “perfect,” untroubled life is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things for ourselves, are all part of our ways of developing into an adult.

*           *           *

Each of our life journeys is unique. No child will take the same journey as the parent and no parent can determine what a child’s journey will be.

To see or purchase Many Ways to Say I Love You, click here:

back to nutsense