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Parenting Throughout the Lifespan by Linda Kreger Silverman, Gifted Development Center Your children are angels who have been given into your care for the brief moment called childhood. While you are parenting babies in diapers, it feels like that moment is an eternity. But all too quickly, infants become children with wills of their own and sometimes it feels like a battle of your will versus theirs. You have been told that a good parent has control of his or her children so that you can take them in public places without embarrassment. One of these public places is school. Here they are expected to be a credit to your parenting, even when you are not there to supervise them. And you hope that they will grow up to be responsible citizens who do the right things. In preparing them for responsible citizenship, you expect that they will fulfill their even-increasing responsibilities at school—following the rules, doing their homework, studying for exams, and getting good grades so that they can attend good colleges and lay the foundation for a secure future.If you buy without question this picture of parenting, you are overlooking something very important. Childhood is but a small portion of a person’s life—and it is becoming smaller and smaller as the life span increases. In Mel Brooks’ “2000-Year-Old Man,” he says, “Who needed divorce? We had death!” The lifespan was considerably shorter than it is now. And the prescriptions for parenting that have come down to us from generation to generation are based upon the economic survival needs of generations of parents who had much shorter life spans. At the age of 62, I am blessed to have both of my parents alive. They are 95 and 90, and they live in an apartment two doors away from my sister’s apartment. My sister is 69. She has had a relationship with our parents for 69 years. Most of that time she has been an adult. And she has spent more years being responsible for their welfare than they spent being responsible for hers. If you can look beyond the roles of parent and child, you can begin to appreciate that this presence you have brought into your life is a lifelong companion, friend, and fellow traveler on this journey called life. Look deeply into your child’s eyes and you will see a unique individual with special gifts to bring you. Even the challenges they present are gifts to assist your own growth. If you have more than one child, you know how unique each child really is. This journey you are on together will hopefully last many decades, and, in the end, the roles will be reversed and they will parent you. You must develop a relationship with your child that is robust enough to survive throughout the lifespan and transform as developmental changes transform your roles. You can demand that children be responsible and respectful, but you cannot demand love and genuine caring. These can only be given freely by children who have received your love. They can care for you out of duty or because they love you. When your children become adults, what kind of relationship do you want with them? How would you like your adult children to feel about you? Take a moment and write down what you hope your relationship with your children will be like during their adult years. A group with whom I recently did this exercise wrote down the following ideas: Ø CommunicationØ Mutual respect Ø Honesty Ø Unconditional love Ø Love doing things together Ø Trust Ø Knowing that it’s OK to make mistakes Ø Mutual appreciation Ø Being friends Ø Being a good listener Ø Having common interests Ø Humor I had anticipated two parts to this exercise—the goals and the means to achieve them. However, when I looked at the goals that this group in Missouri generated, I realized that the goals and the process were identical. I also asked the group, “Write down what you need to do now to create that kind of relationship with your growing children.” The list I came up with on my own was quite similar to theirs:
Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist. She directs the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development, and its subsidiaries, the Gifted Development Center (www.gifteddevelopment.com), and Visual-Spatial Resource (www.visualspatial.org), in Denver, Colorado. Over 4,200 children have been assessed at the Gifted Development Center in the last 23 years. Her Ph.D. is in educational psychology and special education from the University of Southern California. For nine years, she served on the faculty of the University of Denver in counseling psychology and gifted education. Her textbook, Counseling the Gifted and Talented (Love: 1993), is the most popular text in this field and has been adopted at more than 50 colleges and universities. Her new book, Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner, was released November 1, 2002. She founded the only journal on adult giftedness, Advanced Development. Currently, she is conducting research on profoundly gifted children, the visual-spatial learner, comparative assessment of the gifted on different instruments, the effects of vision therapy, and introversion. She has been appointed to the American Psychological Association task force on giftedness, the National Association for Gifted Children task force on social and emotional needs of the gifted, and the expert panel guiding the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, Revision 5, for Riverside Publishing. Linda has been studying the assessment, psychology and education of the gifted since 1961 and she has written over 300 articles, chapters and books in this field. |
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Copyright 2002-2005 Valerie Thea Vandermeer. All rights reserved. For problems or questions regarding this website contact valerie@earth-walk.net. Last updated: July 22, 2006. |
