It is the decisions in parenting that get to me. It isn't the work - diapers and cooking and walks to the park aren't really my thing but they aren't hard. It is the constant need to come up with answers and the challenge of never knowing if I got it right.
There is a lot of physical work in the process of raising a child, and I even have a deformed ribcage from carrying her around on my hip while she was tiny, and the doctor expects that to stay that way forever. (Pretty normal for women, rare for men, not actually a problem either way.) But those things are trivial compared to the challenge of making all the decisions required to bring up a kid.
Pinkie Pie hasn't been feeling well the past few weeks and has missed some school. Sometimes this sort of thing is easy - child is coughing and sneezing, keep them home till it stops. No big deal. The trouble is when it is 'my tummy doesn't feel right' and 'my head doesn't feel right'. I want to take care of Pinkie Pie if she really isn't feeling well, but I don't want her to just start talking about symptoms that she knows I can't check on every time she doesn't feel like doing something.
Is letting her stay home when she just isn't feeling right the correct choice? How much should I worry about her schoolwork? Should I force her to sit down and do assignments when she is home sick if she looks up to it but doesn't want to do them?
This is the part of parenting that beats me down. I try so hard to get every decision right and not only do I lack the information to do so, I can't even look at my choices afterwards and figure out if I did things correctly.
Being a good parent, making these choices properly, these are some of the most important things to me. I know rationally that once I give Pinkie Pie all her physical requirements and love and reasonable chances at mental stimulation that doing everything perfectly won't do much. It is easy to destroy a person by being a horrible parent, but quite impossible to make them perfect by doing everything right.
But I still struggle with the sense that I am getting all these day to day decisions wrong.
I don't have the blessing of having had a child, but i'd say maybe she is getting a bit too spoiled. Show her how even if she isn't feeling 100 percent you still have to do what is expected of you. I guess parenting by example would be the best way, show her how even if you are sick or tired, things need to be done.
ReplyDeleteThat there is my two cents...
It is easy to make these decisions and come to conclusions when you imagine that you *know* when your kid is ok and when they are not. How do you know when the kid is really sick? I don't have a magic wand to wave to figure that out, and that zone of uncertainty is the problem.
DeletePretending that you can figure such things out when a person like myself who has far more knowledge can't do so is unreasonable. It is easy to just yell at kids to go to school when they are sick; far harder to actually make the decision of when to send them and when to let them stay home and do it correctly.