The Rule of Two

During our active child-rearing years, my husband Tom and I developed a strategy that enabled everyone in the household to "get a life." I called it the Rule of Two: each family member could have two activities outside of job or school, and we adults agreed to limit ourselves to two evening absences per week. Everyone was able to get something he wanted, but no one got everything he wanted. It ensured that family life didn't revolve around a single member, and it helped the kids learn how to prioritize and make choices. It helped prevent the "it's all about me" orientation I've noticed in kids who aren't given limits.

If you're feeling frustrated by a hyperactive family schedule or are detecting signs of entitlement in certain family members, try the Rule of Two. You might be surprised at how effective a simple change can be.

Why You MUST Have a Life Outside Family

For almost two decades, we've been going deeper and deeper into a style of parenting that not only fosters dependency in young people but also does strange things to many of the moms who practice it religiously. For lack of a better word ( "official" terms like Helicopter and Supermom don't encompass the whole role), I call it the Fertilizer Mom trend. The unspoken assumptions of Fertilizer Mom culture are:

• Being a "good" parent is not the most important goal in your life; it should be the only goal. Wanting to do other things occasionally is selfish.
  
• A good mom exists to help her kids get to the top of the heap. Back in the day, it also meant making your kids the best-fed, housed and clothed ones on the block, via homemaking. Now it mostly means facilitating their educational careers by driving them to any team practices, lessons and other stuff you can cram into the schedule, and by volunteering 40 hours a week at the school so you can be eligible for favors from school staff (like recommendations) when needed.
• Work done in the home simply because the kid is a member of the family (popularly called "chores") robs him of time he could spend studying, practicing or working on yet another activity to pad his college apps; therefore, a good mom doesn't require that her kids do chores. Requiring them to do any "adult" work makes you a slacker mom.
  
• You can judge a mom's character and worthiness entirely by how her kids are doing. If they're on top of the world, she's a good mom. If not...
  
• It's okay to have casual buddies (all parents from your kids' various groups) but since your job is to pave the way for your kids, you may have to step on said friends' toes in order to do this if their kids are standing in the way of your kids.

Back when I was working a job, raising two kids with my husband and trying to write, I envied friends who had the luxury of being at-home moms for long stretches. Now in retrospect I notice that some of those women fell prey to Fertilizer Mom syndrome, and in all cases I think it was because they had no emotional investment in anything but their kids - no job to force them to diversify.

A few such friends underwent some unhappy personality changes. These included becoming a one-upper or "comparison" parent, with an attendant cattiness towards other women; exhibiting a growing level of desperation when things went wrong with a child (and "wrong" could mean going from a 4.0 to 3.8!), or developing a competitive streak suitable for a Fortune 500 CEO but not a parent. The first and last two changes I could ignore when I saw them in other women. After all, no one was forcing me to remain part of such conversations.

The middle change, desperation, was terrible to see. And in each instance it could have been avoided by the mom, not by changing her kid but by investing in other loves as well as in her kids.

Of course your kids will remain the most important part of your lives, and if anything bad happens to any of them, it could be devastating. But having separate interests, pursuits and friends will keep molehills from becoming mountains; you'll hurt or worry if your child falls seriously ill, for example, but not if she fails to make the A-level team and has to settle for B instead. It will prevent the sort of emotional over-investment that makes moms do crazy things like kill a daughter's competitor for a spot on the cheerleading squad or devise a fake Facebook user who convinces another child to commit suicide.

I believe it's best to even have a friend or two who have never met any members of your family. They are possibly the only people who will take you for who you are, without the strings of a dependent's reputation lifting you up or dragging you down. During one especially dark time in my family's history last year, the people who really pulled me through were the members of my writers' group. We've had very limited contact with each others' families, and several members haven't met any of mine. Yet because of their detachment, they were able to help me put things in perspective.

And you know what? They were right.

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.