Small in Stature, Big in Responsibility
Hello fellow readers,
Small in Stature, Big in Responsibility is the next installment of the sequel to The Lake Effect.
I always felt small next to my parents. Not just in stature but in importance – to the family, even though I was the oldest of my two siblings. In fact, all three of us, I believed growing up, felt small compared to our parents. But for me there was duplicitness in my smallness. Yes, they were the parents and provided all of our basic Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but the real authoritarian amongst the three of us was me. My smallness in my parents’ eyes allowed me to be large – not gigantic or inappropriately large – but large in a way that was only slightly smaller than my parents. I thought of our family hierarchy as Dad, Mom, Me, Daniel, Katie.
And subconsciously, so did my parents.
My parents simply trusted me. All day and all night if needed. The idea of me making a bad decision just never occurred to them, nor to my siblings. And to my credit, it never occurred to me to take advantage of the power bestowed upon me. It was just the way it was.
Apparently, there’s a parenting term for that: benign neglect. And my mother was all for it. My dad was all for it by default; being raised in the seventies, and all, dads just deferred to moms on parenting tactics.
And I have to say, it worked well most days – even years. My father was a traveling salesman, out of town more times than not. My mother worked various part-time jobs – retail, hosting Tupperware parties…watching soap operas, drinking whisky sours. It’s not that she didn’t care about us, it’s just that her motto was: If you get yourself in trouble, rely on yourself to figure out a solution. Don’t come to me unless you have a bone sticking out somewhere it shouldn’t, or you’re bleeding so badly it requires stitches. Oh, and be home by dinner time or when it gets dark.
So that’s what we did. We played at friends’ houses, at our house in the basement, behind the drugstore, the local dentist office, rode our bicycles everywhere. Sometimes the three of us would all be together and sometimes we took off in different directions, but I always seemed to know where each of us was, or I knew which house to knock on to find out. All the moms took part in benign neglect, but the houses were small back then, even the most self-absorbed mom couldn’t help but notice if the front door slammed and two or three kids ran inside to use the toilet, even if the kid wasn’t their kid.
I never once felt frightened, for myself or for my siblings. I got to be in charge of myself and have the power over my siblings. All three of us knew how the rules worked.
Can you imagine benign neglect parenting these days? Social services, the cops, the nosy neighbors, the schools, you name it, would all be up in arms over the lack of parental control.
Personally, I think there has to be a happy balance between benign neglect and helicopter parenting.
What are your thoughts?
It’s all about the discussions, my fellow readers.
Till next time.
Ruth
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