Pam is Really Cool
I have a break and thought I would brag on Pam for a second. Over the past few weeks I have been I’m preparing a seminar with her and it has been an amazing reminder of how awesome the woman I am married to is. Pam is really cool.
One of the companies that I chaplain for does random seminars for life. They have a core value of “Learn & Grow” and last year they purposely expanded the idea of “Learn & Grow” to areas of “soft skills” and other areas of life outside of work. So they asked me if I could do a course on relationships. After 4 weeks of discussing how to have healthier relationships a few people asked for a parenting seminar. I mentioned Pam’s credentials and expertise from her field to the company and they thought it was a great idea. So yesterday Pam and I led a seminar at this company on the subject of Parenting.
She has a wealth of experience, both personal and professional, as well as a good grasp of research on the subject. We have both thought about what we would lead during the seminar and really started finalizing everything this past weekend. Yesterday we led the seminar for the company and it was really cool watching her lead a group of people that she had never met before and them discovering what an amazing person she is. She knows her stuff and it showed yesterday.
On another note
One of the things leading this seminar reminded me of is the desperate fear that so many parents walk around with that they will somehow, unknowingly, screw up their kids. Often parents of all ages live without much deep interaction in the lives of other parents and thus can have no idea what is a normal struggle and what isn’t. What kids will grow out of and what is an actual danger sign. Because of the size of our families now we aren’t around significantly younger kids much anymore till we have our own kids. I, for one, didn’t spend much time at all around babies till I was the parent of one and thus I live with a constant fear that I was somehow going to “break” Adam for the first few months of his life.
Used to be you would have been involved in the “parenting” of much younger brothers or sisters if you were one of the older kids in the family, or if you were one of the younger kids you would have been involved in helping your older siblings with their first kids. We had lots of “practice” at parenting just through our daily lives. Most people don’t now. Thus parenting is often an initially foreign skill set for parents and to make matters worse many don’t have a broad social group around them to help them face these new challenges.
I’m not trying to romanticize the past. Various aspects of the past were better in some manners, and WAY worse in others. The same is true for parenting in the past. Some of it was better and some of it was worse.
I guess what I am saying is perhaps we older parents should invite younger couples with kids over for supper often, not lecture them about parenting but just to be with them, listening to them, and maybe help them bare the fear and worry of parenting, so they can better experience the joy and wonder that is also there.
Or maybe cook s’mores with them. That would be real helpful. Let’s invite younger parents over and fill their young kids up with sugar. That should be helpful. 🙂