I once heard a statement that ‘normal is just a setting on your dryer’!
Too true, normal is not a constant and cannot be measured, but as a Parent we are building ‘normal’ for our kids every day.
When my first child was about 18 months old and not able to say many words, I had an experience that changed the way I view parenting. After popping her in her car seat I got in the car to reverse out of our driveway. I was in the habit at that time of putting my seat belt on after I had reversed. As the car started backwards, my toddler indicated with her voice that something was disturbing her. Pointing and grunting she seemed upset by something. I realized after a moment or two that the lack of seat belt over my shoulder was causing concern.
When I put it on, she relaxed and assumed her “all is right with the world” posture.
This incident made me see that to a child that young, what I had always done, what she had seen over and over again, was her sense of normal, and that to her made it right. Although she didn’t understand why a seatbelt was good and necessary, she believed it was because that was to her ‘normal’.
The depth of this revelation is enormous. If a child grows up with kindness, that child thinks kindness is normal. If a child grows up with anger, then that too becomes to them a ‘normal’.
If we consider something simple like the difference between a child who is always served dinner at the table with the whole family, and a child who is given food in front of the television, both will grow to think that practice they are used to is normal. When the time comes for sleep overs at friend’s houses, although neither method is right or wrong, the child will expect things to be done the way they are used to and may be quite surprised. This is of course the way that children grow to maturity by seeing different ways to do things and by experiencing things beyond what they already know. It does make us think though, what normal are we building for our kids.
Remember the old saying (we all know it doesn’t work) “do as I say, not as I do?
Children learn from our actions as well as our words. We model certain behaviour and children imitate it. That is the way they are made. They mimic what they see and what they perceive to be normal.
A challenge for you today, look at the ‘normals’ you are modelling and reinforcing for your kids, and consider adding a few of these attributes to the list of ‘normals’ in your home, respect, honesty, kindness, encouragement, focussed listening, generosity, trust, dependability, forgiveness, get the idea?
What a privilege we have as parents to be the first people to build ‘normals’, for our children and their future!
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