Default mode of parenting

Have you ever wondered why there are no professional courses to prepare us to be parents? I mean: all professional work requires professional training, often over many years - just to equip us with the basic knowledge and skills to start us off the professional work. But parenting? As I think about it, I sometimes find it strange. Parenting, to me, is no less an important or complex 'job' as any other modern day professions. Yet, while we undergo many years of intensive formal preparatory training for our professional work, we receive none for the lifelong 'job' of parenting. Could it be one reason why many of us feel very inadequate for the work of parenting? I certainly do feel inadequate - more with every passing year.

It is perhaps not exactly correct to say we did not receive preparation for parenting. The main source of pre-parenting 'training' is via the mode of observation - years of observing how we were parented by our parents. I think it is true to say that for most of us, our default mode of parenting is the way our parents parent us - because this is the only mode we know very well, having observed it for decades! In fact, I often 'caught' myself - always upon hindsight - treating my children the same way my parents treated me. One example is the tendency to become short-tempered at my children and to shout at them loudly with an angry tone. My wife used to say this to me, "I notice you are very impatient with our children and shout at them with a very scary tone and bulging eyes. But this is NOT you. You do not behave like this to other people." upon some soul searching, I realize that I was behaving in exactly the same way as my father on those occasions. I did not consciously intend to emulate him; it was subconscious imitation.

If your parents were good parenting models, then I think your had received very good 'training' to be a parent. But if you, like me, had parents with numerous parenting flaws [I should add at this point that this does not diminish my respect for them; for they lived through very difficult times where putting food on the table was already a big challenge, let alone the challenges of meeting our other needs], then I guess we need to do a lot of 'deconstructing' - consciously unlearning from our default mode of parenting and reflecting upon how we need to reconstruct new models to better help our children.

Over the last few years, I have found the work of 'deconstructing' onerous (because it means active reflection regularly) but rewarding. I found that I learnt a lot about myself and my children when I challenge the fundamentals of my default mode of parenting and found them lacking. I learnt to move out of my comfort zone to try new models of parenting. One such model that I have experimented (and still experimenting) is the active engagement mode of parenting - where I actively engage my children, communicate with them regularly, enjoy spending time with them etc. This is quite a contrast from the rather passive mode adopted by my parents - the picture of my father in my growing years is of one returning home from work to spend many hours on the television, responds to us only when we approach (say, for pocket money and signing of the report book), distant from us emotionally.

Deconstructing is a long process. It is an effort to change myself first(before I think of changing my children) As in all such self-renewal efforts, it is painful, humbling, and slow. In fact, writing these blogs is part of the process.