I just finished reading No Regrets Parenting by Harley A. Rotbart, M.D. and it was chock full of useful tips and ideas for bonding with your kiddos from diapers to their college years. Mostly Rotbart gives you a blueprint for how to create special moments with your kids at a time in modern history where free time is at a premium. Rotbart isn’t interested in psychobabble or tough love (this isn’t a book about discipline or behavior modification techniques), it’s more about specific activities to create memories as a family and generate informal traditions. Having said that, you definitely come away feeling that there’s a hard-to-argue correlation between happy, well-behaved kids and focused, fun parents.
The book’s strength is the easy to digest smorgasbord of great ideas. I loved it. As a new parent, I found his main premise particularly illuminating. No Regrets Parenting is centered on creating a legacy – what exactly will your kids remember about their time with you? Are you making the most of the limited number of weeks and years you have with your children? When the days are long, but the years are short are you missing out on genuine connection while you have a (relatively) captive audience? He reminds you every few pages, lest you forget, that these opportunities to connect with your kids have a shelf life and you should take advantage before they are gone.
Rotbart believes one powerful way to create lasting memories with your kids is to allow them to really KNOW you. I connected with that message loud and clear. I had a happy childhood and growing up I have no complaints, but it’s only been in recent years that I feel like I’m getting to know my parents as people, not only as my mother and father. It’s one of the main reasons I started this blog, if not the main reason. I’m not planning on oversharing with Townes and Daisy (I'm happy to take the sordid details of my tequila-soaked 21st birthday and the ugly aftermath with me to my grave), and I certainly look to my own mom as a role model for healthy boundaries (more on that later this week) but I don’t want them to grow up feeling like there are areas off limits for conversation or that my life started when they were born (I mean, metaphorically it absolutely DID, but I also had a childhood and an adolescence and a pretty interesting life before they came along). I also want Daisy and Townes to know that I am NOT perfect and I make mistakes too. I loved hearing about the silly things my mom and dad did when they were kids. My dad tells a hilarious story about how he played hooky one day from middle school in New Jersey and decided to go into Manhattan. His group of friends was randomly interviewed on the street by a local television crew (about a department store grand opening if I remember correctly) and my grandmother would have never known except that she happened to be home and saw them on TV! How awesome is that? He was so excited to be on television that it never even occurred to him that it might be a bad idea to be filmed while being truant.
Rotbart encourages parents to create mini moments and
traditions to celebrate as a family. Not surprisingly for us, mealtimes are
going to feature prominently. I get some of my biggest and best belly laughs
from the kids’ antics at mealtime. Other traditions I certainly hope will
involve travel – camping, visiting the US of A in a car (who am I to monkey
with the time-honored tradition of torture by family truckster…Wally World here
we come!), and if we play our cards right – maybe even some international
destinations.
Flying in the face of modern kid-vehicle-placation tactics,
Rotbart promotes the family car as a no-fly zone for ANY technological devices.
No iPads, no phones, just good old fashioned conversation. I like that idea. I’m
not sure if our kids are going to like that idea, but that’s not the point.
While those car rides were happening when I was a pre-teen, I can’t say that I
appreciated them exactly. But some of my most vivid memories as an adult
revolve around family trips – the good, the bad and the really, horribly ugly.
Good times. This was one unexpected benefit of reading No Regrets Parenting. It brought
back memories of my own childhood and ways in which I connected with my own mom
and dad. A great read.
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