What kind of parenting life do you want? Get specific!

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This article is kicks off our Whole Life Parenting series, which offers practical tips to meet the needs of both parents and children.

It’s spring. Time to think about renewal, visions, and growing the lives we want.

Do you want to have a life in addition to having a child?

I think that’s perfectly reasonable.

What do you want that life to look like?

Between school, the babysitting coop, and my work with Awake Parent, I talk to parents quite a bit.  I’ve noticed that many parents, particularly parents of young children, are pretty much consumed with parenting. Parenting is their life.

If that’s what makes you happy—cool! Congratulations on manifesting exactly what you want.

However…

If since becoming a parent you have found yourself:

• Wanting more time with your friends
• Not finding enough time with your spouse or partner
• Not knowing whether or how you might be able to date or have romance or sex in your life
• Wanting to be more caught up on your reading
• Neglecting self-care rituals
• Lacking exercise
• Either giving up your boundaries too easily, or enforcing them more harshly than you’d like

And…

You would like that to be different…

…you are not alone!

Parenthood can be the most consuming undertaking of your whole life, and few resources show us how to balance things. For all its talk of family values, this culture offers precious little in terms of built-in structures for support, relief and balance.

Luckily, we can create our own structures and practices. When we stand back and rethink things like social time, self-care, and exercise, we can find many, many options for structuring these activities in ways that allow us to have more of what we want in our lives in a way that also nurtures our children.

When we replenish ourselves by meeting our human, adult needs, we bring a stronger and more able self to our children.

The first step is to decide to do it. A friend, a single mom who scarcely gets out more than once a year said to me, “I don’t know how you have time to do all that you do,” I told her it was because I decided to.

Okay, no fair, I decided long before I had a child that I would only have a child with someone who truly saw him or herself as a full-time parent, so I could also have a whole life as a parent. And I was fortunate enough to find someone who saw himself as, and agreed to be, a 50-50 parent. We continue to co-parent in this spirit, even though the relationship between the two of us is no longer what it was.

I am very fortunate. I had seen way too many examples of families, even progressive families, in which the birth mother simply took on everything, sometimes including a full-time job, while most or all of her former life fell by the wayside.

I knew I wanted a different form of parenting, one in which being a parent was an integral component of who I was, but not the one determining aspect. Given my strong calling to give birth to books and other creative projects, I had decided that being a 50-50 parent was the way to go.  That intention helped me create structures that would allow me to parent in the way that met my needs. Now I have time with my child, and also time to do other things, some that involve my child, some that do not.

Still…my first step in creating this life that I wanted was to envision it, and then decide I was going to have it.

In the coming weeks, as part of this Whole Life Parenting series, we’ll be sharing  practical tips on how to meet your needs as well as your children’s needs. Many, many sources tell us that the first step in creating things the way we want is to get specific about what we want.  So, let’s do it now: With specific detail, What kind of parenting life do you want?

Please feel free to share your answers in the comment box below. We’ll try to incorporate your wildest dreams for yourself as a parent into our upcoming posts.

I can’t wait to hear them!

Warmly,

Jill