Responsibility

A conversation with my man the other day has had my thinking a lot about responsibility and how it's learned and what it really means.


Google says responsibility is:

• the state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone.
• "women bear children and take responsibility for child care"
• synonyms: authority, control, power, leadership
• "a job with greater responsibility"
• the state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something.
• "the group has claimed responsibility for a string of murders"
• synonyms: blame, fault, guilt, culpability, liability
• "they denied responsibility for the bomb attack"
• the opportunity or ability to act independently and make decisions without authorization.
• "we would expect individuals lower down the organization to take on more responsibility"

I think the third definition is the kind of responsibility I'm looking for my boys to feel.  In a very real way I am responsible for their health and safety.  Legally and morally they are completely dependent on me and any responsibility they have, they have because I give it to them.  If I give them responsibility but then punish or shame them (parental disappointment in a child is shaming them for not living up to parental expectations) then they didn't really have the authority to act independently because there was a "wrong" way to do things.

I think the responsibility that most people put on children is the second definition above and look at all those synonyms: blame, fault, guilt, culpability and liability.  Those are not feelings I want to be heaping on my little boys.  They're seriously shitty feelings but they're commonly used to manipulate children into acting in ways that their parents approve of and for lots of kids they work for a while.  Eventually the relationship and the child's trust in the parent erode to a point where the child fights back, because what self respecting person wouldn't fight against some who uses their love and dependence to manipulate them?  Or they don't become a self respecting person and child's trust in the parent doesn't erode and instead their trust in themselves as people capable of making good decisions weakens  until they stop listening to their inner voices and lose their capacity for independence.  Is there another outcome I'm missing (and I don't think the above options are mutually exclusive)?  The rebellious teenage years are the first case.  They are not inevitable.  All the people around us who follow the "expert" advice of whomever without thinking about whether it really makes sense are examples of the latter.

I want my boys to be able to trust their inner voices and to know in a very deep way that their life and experiences and wants are valid.  I think that the way to get there is to help them succeed by giving them real responsibility that they are ready for.  That means setting them up to succeed by not giving them responsibility they aren't ready for and then shaming or punishing them into meeting expectations (giving them the message that they aren't good enough as they are). Its means that when I give them responsibility it will truly be their responsibility and they will be able to "act independently and make decisions without authorization."  There aren't a lot of real responsibilities I can give to a 6 and a 2 year old, but there are some.  I can give them their own money that they can spend however they wish and with very few exceptions I can let them make and learn from their own decisions.  They can chose what to put in their bodies.  They need  me to prepare their food still but I can prepare the foods they like and offer new things and let them decide without pressure what they want.

I don't let them hit each other or break things that aren't okay to break, but it's MY responsibility to keep them safe from each other and keep other's property safe from their exploration.  They are learning what is acceptable and what isn't, right now they are young and haven't developed the ability to think through an action to its likely results AND judge if it's a good idea consistently yet (or at all in the 2 year old's case).  Plenty of adults have a hard time with that whole thinking things through and impulse control so it's seriously unfair to expect it of such young and inexperienced children.

As they mature I'll experiment with giving them more responsibility and see how they do.  If they handle it well and seek out more responsibility I'll let them do more.  If they let me know verbally or by their actions that they can't handle it yet (A can't be safely left alone with the cats for example, he still pulls their tails) then I will stay closer in those situations until it seems like it might be time to try again.  By handle it well I don't mean they make the choices that I specifically think they should make, as long as their choices that don't cause active harm to themselves and others or property I'd like to let them explore their own choices, whatever they are.

Cleaning

This is probably what this place is gonna look like.  Random posts with no schedule and who knows how long in between.  I'm okay with that.  :)

 So, today I want to ramble on about why I don't make my boys clean up after themselves.

My personal experience is that being made to clean things up doesn't teach a person how to be a clean person.  My parents had fairly typical expectations, we did chores, washing dishes and being responsible for our own rooms.  Our house was never one from the pages of a magazine but Mom made sure the kitchen stayed clean and the rest of the house was lived in and more or less picked up.  As an adult it has taken me years of feeling pretty crappy about my lack of housekeeping skills to begin to accept that I will never be able to keep house like my mom did.  What works for her doesn't work for me, she did her best, but it wasn't something I could be "taught."

What it did lead to was evenings spent avoiding my family because it was my turn for the dishes and I didn't want to do them (and if no one specifically told me to do them I could pretend I "forgot" it was my turn right?).  Afternoons spent "cleaning" my room because I was told to but it was so overwhelming I never knew where to even start.  I've just never been a tidy person.  Now I have a family to care for and I'm still trying to figure out how to keep things together, it's hard.  But making me do chores didn't make it easier so I can at least save my boys the negative memories I have associated with them.

They're learning the skills anyway because it's really pretty impossible not to.  But they're learning them without the addition of outside pressure that leads to avoidance.  They have both now gone through periods of helping and even doing the vacuuming, not too thoroughly of course, but with joy, it was FUN and something they wanted to help with.  P, at 6 years old, will initiate and ask for help cleaning up his room and other messes.

Last week the boys destroyed a roll of toilet paper together and picked it up together without any outside pushing.  And when A, 2 years old, tried to flush most of it down the toilet in one go they unclogged it together without asking for help.  Being able to really see the ways that they are learning and having the confidence to try things out really really helps me feel like I'm giving them a chance to develop a different relationship to cleaning than I have.

Time will tell, but I'm giving them a chance to clean because it feels good to have a clean space and it feels good to make  things more pleasant for those around us instead of cleaning because they'll get in trouble or disappoint me if they don't.  The more I practice cleaning with those positive feelings the easier it gets and the better I feel when I'm done but I still have a lot of "I'm not good enough" feelings wrapped up with my housecleaning challenges and that doesn't make things better in any way.

Even if it turns out I'm wrong and they'll need to learn to clean house later in life in a more structured way I figure having more joy and peace now can't possibly make that harder and will let us have the peace and joy now and a stronger relationship between us and more confidence in themselves.

Writing

I had an epiphany last night while I was lying awake in the middle of the night

I love writing

For pretty much all of my life I've thought I hated it.  I was good at it in school, but I hated it.

I'm very introverted but I love talking to people, sharing ideas, helping people understand things and writing is a PERFECT match for that.

My husband and I have our best conversations, debates and even arguments in writing.  There's no interruptions in writing.  No formulating your next point while the other speaks so you miss what they're saying.  If something is hard to hear it's easy to break away to think about it and come back, the thoughts are there to ponder.  They don't vanish like spoken word does.

Writing helps me focus my thoughts and make them much clearer than they ever get rolling around in my head and it also gives me another level of filter  to help me avoid saying words that truly shouldn't be said.

But for almost all of my life I've thought I hated writing, and I know why:

School.

Where most (if not all) of the writing was meaningless assignments to write x pages about something specific that had been written many times before, that I didn't care about, and that no one actually wanted to read.

The purpose of writing is to share an idea or to remember something important (are there any other reasons to write?)  the vast majority of writing in school never met either of those and since doing pointless shit with no purpose is something I'm really averse to (abhorrent to me was the first thought but that seemed a bit extreme ;)) I internalized it as though I hated writing itself.  School couldn't be wrong after all...

A couple things came together to trigger this realization.  An unschooling discussion in a live chat room where Sandra Dodd discussed that the medium was hard for lots of people (the fast moving chat with interweaving threads and typing responses while the chat kept moving) and the thought that it could be difficult to follow was a surprise to me.

With that percolating in the back of my mind I took a Myers-Briggs type personality test and reading the results was interesting.  It said my type are almost universally writers and poets.  My first thought was ick, wrong there.  But I guess it percolated together to form last night's epiphany.  Without the overlay of school's idea of what writing is damaging my understanding of what it can be I could have been loving it all these years.

Added to all of this someone shared: Mary Lambert: Secrets

Well, better late than never.  I've got a lot of thoughts in my head that could use the polishing effect that writing has for me and I don't think I need to be quite so private any more.