Little Jack's CornerThe Life & Times of Jack-Evan and Family

Ahhh…Nicknames.  Those loveable monikers our family and friends give us are (usually!) a warm fuzzy feeling of belonging.  They signify acceptance, being “in” with someone, friendship, and unity.  Even if one claims to hate a particular family given nickname, you must admit that it’s usually feels better to have one than to not have one.   It gives you a special identity above and beyond your given birth name. 

Sometimes nicknames are a shortened form of your common name, usually a one syllable shortening such as “Bob” (for Bobby) or ”Liz” (for Elizabeth).  Other nicknames can be based on someone’s last name, or even their initials (my husband’s nickname is K.J., after his first and middle name).  And then there are nonsensical names based on personality traits, looks, or just something fun to say that seems to stick.

Parents and Grandparents tend to be the ones to saddle kids with nicknames that stick throughout life, with siblings close behind them.  For instance, my family’s nickname for me is “Lisa Bug”.  My grandmother called me that as a baby, and it stuck.  At 25 years of age, my older family members still call me Lisa Bug.   Funny thing is, I really don’t mind it.  (Here again, insert that fuzzy warm feeling of “belonging”).   My mother’s siblings carry the burdens of such nicknames as “Tunk”, “Nudie”, “Sissy”, “Sambo”, “Leeky”, and “Bubba”.   My mother’s own aunts and uncles carried such nicknames as “Doc”, “Shorty”, and “Sis”.  Some of my cousin’s nicknames include “RutRut”, “TamTam”, “Beana”, and “Karaboo”.

A nickname, when used often, can even become permanently entrenched in a person’s identity.  My maternal grandmother was known as “Bessie” her entire life, although this was not her given name.  And I couldn’t even imagine calling my Uncle Bubba by his given name (Bethea).  It just seems much too formal.

So with that in mind, what nicknames do you have for your kids?

Around here, Jack-Even has picked up quite a couple of nicknames already.  The most common used by most of our family is “Little Jack” and “Jack-Jack”.  My mom calls him her little “Tunkey” (rhymes with Monkey – mom use to call ME “monkey”).  But as parents, Kevin and I have done our duty and saddled him with a few more.  What are they?  

 ”Chugar Boog” (rhymes with sugar), “Chugar Butt”, and ………uh…..”Poopie Head“.  

Perhaps we should think about changing that last one in a couple of months though.   I mean, you never know… one day, our entire descending line might know him as Uncle Poopie Head.  Im just sayin’!

So what about you?  What do you call your kids?

…if you clicked on this title to gleam some expert tips on the best way to raise your kids..

Well, you’ve found the wrong place.

What you have found though, is a young, somewhat-still-inexperienced 25 year old mommy who wants more than anything to raise her kids in the best way possible.  But what does that mean, exactly?

There are so many schools of thought out there about what “raising a child” means, and each side has their critics and supporters who use their own praising or derogatory verbiage to get their points across…

Spanking (“Corporal punishment”) vs. Non-Spanking (“Spoiling”)

Dictorial (“Discipline for adulthood”) vs. Self-Freedom (“Running Wild”)

Restricted / No TV (“Too much filth”) vs. unlimited TV viewing (“”training for real world”)

Public Schools vs. Private schools vs. Homeschools

Allowance vs. No Allowance

Chore-based Allowance vs.  Free Allowance

Rules vs. No Rules

Chores vs. No Chores

Scheduling vs. No Schedules

Breastfeeding vs. Formula

Co-sleeping vs. Crib sleeping

…and so much the more.  If it crosses your mind as a parent, you can be assured that millions of other parents out there have a theory about it and you can be darned tootin’ that they fully believe their system is the only way.  In fact, some get down right angry if your don’t raise your own kids the way they say to! But how do they know? What gives one parent the right to demand that another parent bend to a specific style of parenting?  Even though I’m a card-toting member of the co-sleeping, extended breast-feeding, baby-wearing, attatchment-parenting club I don’t pretend to think this is the practice every single mother on planet earth should employ!  It’s just a style of parenting that I believe gives me, personally, the abillity to impart a good amount of love and a nice, healthy start for my son’s life.   Yet, even though I believe in these specific parenting practices, I believe that others who do not employ them can still acheive their desired level of child-rearing results.  How can we claim to know that one specific way of raising a child up is better than another?  We can’t. 

For instance, how many of you think you turned out “ok”?  (((raises hand along with the rest of you)))) Do you think you turned out “ok” because of …or inspite of ….your own parent’s child rearing techniques??  How many of you were raised in one manner, yet are raising your own children – or plan to raise your own children – in different ways and methodologies?  What makes you think that you now know better than your own parents or that your own children will turn out “better” than you did? 

There’s no real way to answer those questions.  They’re just things that I myself ponder.  For example… my firstborn, my little wonderful Jack-Evan, is now almost 5 months old.  As I’m sure many mothers out there do, I’ve had a picture in my mind for a while now of how I want to raise my children.  Through various readings of books and other such things, I find sometimes my mind latching onto other schools of thought saying “Hey, I agree with that!  I need to incorporate that into my parenting style”.  

Then the thought will hit me:  My own parents never used that method to raise me.  Then my mind wanders to my own childhood and how I would have felt if such various childrearing techniques suggested in many parenting manuals would have been used on me.  Many of them I truly would have hated living through.  I also remember various people I grew up with and different parenting styles I saw enforced.  More often than not, the more “stricter” the parents were with outer rules and regulations, the more “wild” their child would tend to become – right behind their parent’s backs.  

This type of self-reflecting back on our own childhood, I believe, helps give us good “checks and balances” when it comes to raising our own children.  I know it does for me.  It helps me gleam the best parts of how my parents dealt with me, and also shows me what could have been done differently so that I may have been prepared more for adulthood.

Now, in saying that, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best style of parenting anyone can have is not one of “extremes” – but one that allows your child to be prepared for the life you believe he will be leading 20…30…40 years from now.  As parents, it’s our job to look at our station in life, look at the possible (realistic) future that exists for our child, and then guide him into the skills he needs to live successfully. 

Therefore, regardless of the style we choose to employ, I believe that our first ”commandment” in child-rearing should be based on the old proverb,

“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it”.

Let’s google the definition of “train” to get a better glimpse of what that little word proposes.

Train: “create by training and teaching;”

Teaching.  Hrm.  Teaching… that’s an interesting word.  What does it mean in regards to parenting? 

Let’s googlethe definition of teach.

Teach: “impart skills or knowledge to”

But what does impart mean?

Impart: “To give a part or share; To hold a conference or consultation; To communicate the knowledge of; to make known; to show by words or tokens; to tell; to disclose ”

Ah ha.  Here we go now…

We’ve come to the core of parenting it seems.  Communication.

We can discipline, spank, threaten, enforce, and “parent” all we want to.  But unless communication is involved, the reason behind the action does not sink into the child. 

Now what is communication??

Communication: a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior.

Between.  That little word right there might just be the key. 

Between.  Hrm.  Between.

Information is exchanged between individuals.  Do parents always do this?  Or do we sometimes find ourselves simply “giving” information to our child’s face without seeking to find out what’s going on inside their heads?  When we do that (with anyone, not just our children!) are we truly “communicating”?!  No!  Communication involves exchanging information between individuals…plural.  Do we seek to find out what lies behind what motivates our child to do or act or behave in a certain way?  I believe we should. 

Now, when I say you should communicate with your child, I don’t mean just mearly talking.  Commmunication is done through symbols, signs and behaviors (everyone has heard, I’m sure, about how something like 90% of communication is in our body language).  To fully communicate with your child, you must do more than talk.  You must pay attention to their actions and listen to what they’re “not” saying as well.  As a mother of an infant, I can’t rely on verbal communication to understand what my baby needs.  I must spend time with him and pay close attention to subtle details – and change my actions accordingly.  The process does not change much as our children age.  We still need to keep in close fellowship with them so we can see their needs written in their behavior.

Growing up as part of a very conservative circle of people, one of the sayings amongst us was that the “Preacher’s kid was always the worst”.   It wasn’t the case with every preacher we knew, but it was definately a statement we were familiar with.  Could the underlying cause of this stereotyped family have stemmed from a lack of communication? Perhaps in those families…and many others with “strict” rules…children may have been talked “to” more than they were talked “with”.  Communication may have been sorely lacking due to the time the ministry took the father away from the home.  That’s just my theory…but it seems plausible, no?

In my own home, I was raised by parents who didn’t seem to have ever heard the word “strict”.  Oh, I knew what they expected of me in terms of behavior, but I never had any rules hung over my head.  Lest you think we were a bunch of wild hobble gobblins, I must say we were a fairly conservative chuch-going family.  Discipline, for me, came in the form of knowing when I had dissappointed my parents (something I tried hard never to do!).  There were no restrictions on TV viewing, no behavior charts, and certainly no spankings.  I was never even required to do “chores”.  They never acted “above” me.  They never demanded obedience.  Yet I turned out ok… i think.   In other situations, this style of parenting could have produced a terribly wasted, immoral, laggard individual.  But in my case, despite my parent’s seemingly lack of authoritarian traditional parenting, everything worked out fine.  Why is that?  I believe it goes back to the key ingredient – “communication”.  In our family, there was never any doubt in my mind that my parents respected and loved me, and I always felt free to discuss things with them.

And…therefore…because we had open communication, coupled with love, the style of parenting employed worked.  Not because the style of parenting, in and of itself was “good”, but because I knew the motivation behind it. 

These are the types of thing I muse over when thinking about how to best raise Jack.  It also gives me a reality check when I find myself gravitating towards any particular extreme style of parenting.  I’m reminded that no one style fits for all people at all times in all situations.  Parenting is a give and take…an ebb and flow… a dance that we make up as we go along.  What suits our family and child’s needs one day, may not be suitable later on down the road.

 So, reader… what about you?  Have you ever considered why you choose to “parent” like you do?  Do you find yourself drawing upon your own parent’s style of parenting? Or do you avoid it?  If so, and you turned out “ok”, why?  Do you work carefully at trying to truly communicate with your child?  Does your child fully understand why you employ various rules or activities around the home?  When is the last time you examined the reasons behind your parenting style, and is there any way it can be improved upon?

I look at the millions of cases of depression, the isolated loneliness, the break down of family & marriage, the decrease of true friendship, the loss of a true “neighborhood”, the sharp rise in teen violence, the ever increasing abandonment of the elderly, and it seems to be obvious that many of these are decendants from the cultural attitribution of “independence”.   Now, I’m not talking about political independence from government, but the independence from people that America seems to subscribe to.

Independence, is, at it’s core, a pretty selfish goal to aspire to.  Even God agrees, as one of the very first thoughts we encounter in the Bible is “It is not good for man to be alone”. (See Genesis). 

 If God himself doesn’t think being alone is good, why do we?  Why can’t we place our trust in others?  Why do we let other’s trust in us be so easily broken?   Or are we so afraid of being the stereotypically needy person that we back down from what could be a wonderfully fulfilling life caring for -and being cared for by- other wonderful people?  

I will be the first to admit that I can’t “do it” alone.  I need God.  I need people.  I need my husband.  I need my son.  I need my parents, my relatives, and my chuch family.  I can’t make it through life without them mentally, emotionally, or physically.  And I know how much my husband and (especially) my baby boy needs me.  It feels amazing to know I am “needed”.

When life is all “said and done”, the best memories we keep are not of our Lincoln Navigators, Beverly Hills houses, or Kate Spade bags.  No, the last memories on a dying person’s mind is the people being left behind….the good times, the talks, the laughter, the promises.  Although we rarely talk about it, there is probably nothing more saddening than to hear of a funeral of someone who had no one in attendence.  The stark realization is obvious – a life lived alone is not a happy one.  People, husbands, wives, children, friendships, and family are at the core of our lives.  They’re the only things worth living for and fighting for.

So, I ask, why is independence so prized in our culture?  I especially wonder this when it comes to children and our babies.  Recently I did an article on the benefits of Baby Wearing.  This is quite a “modern fad” in the USA, but, oddly enough, it has been practiced the world over for millenia!  The benefits for babies are quite astounding – I’ve even experienced them with my own Little Jack.

Baby Wearing makes life so easy for a new mom, that I’m surprised moms of the last few generations let it slip away so easily.  What I’m NOT surprised about is how the dissappearance came about.  During the early and midhalf of the 1900s, a multitude of child “experts” started cropping up.  These so-called experts, touting their college degrees, started advising mothers to stop “spoiling” their children and begin “independence training” early as possible.  These same experts are the ones who promoted putting a child in a crib immediately and letting them “cry it out”.

Because of the breakdown of family that was happening in the mid-1900s, along with massive social upheaval, women were no longer listening to the age-old advice of mothers, but were reveling in the new philosophies of these “child experts” – most of whom were male! 

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s been quite long enough to see the results of parental philosophies from the past few decades.  And I don’t like it.   It’s crazy to be fearful of sending your own child to school!  And it’s even more crazy to be fearful of being the teacher in that school.  Our children are in danger, and parents are letting them slip through their fingers at an alarming rate.

Look at what a childhood looks like in the mainstream America -

• 6 weeks of age:  off to full time daycare.  Mothers are “strongly” encouraged to place their babies in cribs in their own room at this time.
• 3 years old:  off to preschool, then back to daycare
• 5 years old:  full day kindergarten
• 6 years to 18 years:  full day school
• 15 years+:  full time work or sports after school
• 18 years+: off to college, usually in another state

Those parents who do not adhere to this strict schedule -such as homeschoolers, extended breastfeeders, and co-sleepers - are even ridiculed, discouraged, talked down upon, and even told how “wrong” they are.   Often times I wonder when people make comments such as that, is it really the “person” talking or is it a mainstream sheep mindset taking control?  

Is it any wonder that with this schedule of “independence”, our children up and move away, never to be heard from again (or only at Christmas)?  When on earth do parents have time to parent??  When I use to work at a kindergarten daycare as a teen,  parents would rush in at 6 pm, tired, hassled, and in a hurry.  I knew that many of those kids bedtimes were at 7:30 and 8:00 pm, so I could only imagine the “parenting” that was done during the midst of getting home, getting supper, taking a bath, and going to bed. 

So the next time you consider a parenting philosophy, or the next time you hear “experts” telling you what you “should, and shouldn’t” think, feel, do or say, take the time to mull it over in your head.  Consider what implications the “advice” may have for your family and relationships down the road.  Does your child truly need to be “trained” for independence at 6 months of age?  Does your child truly need to get in the best college?   Do you truly need to take that job in another state if it means leaving behind people that you love? 

Life is short.  Relationships with those you love are shorter.  Don’t let so-called American cultural ideals prevent you from living a full life and doing what is best for your family. 

As you do, keep these questions at the forefront of your mind:

• Who do I want to raise my child – me, a child expert who doesn’t know me, or the government?
• What is the true benefit of…. (insert advice)?
• Who do I want my child to serve – God, the government, others, or self?
• Will listening to this advice ever harm our family?
• What is the history on this piece of advice?
• What benefits do the alternatives offer?
• Is this advice given as a scare tactic, a mind control tactic, or from a biased standpoint?