Parenting Outside the Lines

Nowhere did I feel more out of sync with those around me than my new-mom days almost 20 years ago. We still lived in the homogeneous suburb into which we'd landed when we moved back to the Northwest. All around me, other mothers of young children were loading up minivans and SUVs with kid paraphernalia whenever they went anywhere...enrolling their offspring in every enrichment activity that could be crammed into the schedule... "staying home" so that they could spend their days chauffeuring kids all over creation...and buying stuff for the kids. Lots of stuff.

My husband Tom worked as an assistant in a school district program for the children of farm workers. People who work with low-income Spanish speakers don't make lots of money themselves, so I always had to work as well. During an era when staying home was trendy (rather than being seen as one choice among many), this automatically downscaled me. So did not having the kidstuff and the minivan in which to cram it. My then-teenage stepson resented our "poor" lifestyle.

The problem was that his dad and I didn't feel poor. The house was small but comfortable. We ate well, mostly because we grew many of our own vegetables and we both cook. We found plenty of free and cheap things to do on weekends. Best of all, we were both extremely fit and could walk everywhere. Why would anyone feel sorry for us?

We moved into a downtown neighborhood, boy #1 graduated and left for college, and boy #2 went through school. In this neighborhood our thrifty habits and anti-career jobs weren't out of place. However, another way of being the Very Oddmother presented itself. This was during the late 1990s through about 2005, when the frenzy of "scheduled family hyperactivity" reached its height, along with the glorification of the Helicopter Mom. Any woman who didn't spend every waking minute helping her children be all that they could be was a slacker.

Tom didn't want to give up hiking, I chose to keep on writing and neither of us thought that excusing kids from household work in order to facilitate soccer superstardom provided good role modeling. We made a family rule: each of us could have two activities. Each member gets some of what he wants, but no one gets everything he wants. And all family members contribute to the smooth functioning of the household via useful work (usually called Chores).

Both boys had to earn a certain percentage of expensive wish-list items, such as electronics, by saving allowance, doing yardwork around the neighborhood or eventually, getting a part time job. At age 12, Noel bought his Xbox after saving for nearly 16 months (we paid roughly one-third the cost).

Some of my collegues in the PTSA and other parent groups seemed shocked by this, and by the limits we set on extracurricular activities. But to me, it makes sense: part of the job of parents is to prepare children for adult life, and kids won't be prepared if they don't have basic life skills.

Parenting outside the lines means challenging some basic North American practices:

• Excusing kids from work at home so that they can devote all their time to superachieving at school.
• Buying something simply because all the "it" kids have it.
• Driving kids everywhere when bicycling, walking, taking the city bus or carpooling are options.
• Mistaking good grades for signs of learning or high test scores for evidence of intelligence.
• Insistently railroading all kids towards "college" (the 4-year university) even when the child's interests and abilities lie elsewhere, such as in the trades.
  

Over the past decade, it has seemed to me that more and more parents are questioning these practices. Tough economic times make us reconsider appropriateness and affordability. Maybe someday the lines themselves won't be so confining. In the meantime, people who parent outside the lines need all the resources, support and company they can get. That's what I'll cover during the upcoming month.