Radical Parenting

Radical Acceptance is a term originally used in Buddhism and recently adopted by Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) practitioners and refers to accepting life, regardless of where your life has brought you, on its own terms.

To accept that what you’ve been given in terms of challenges – or blessings – is precisely what you were meant to be given. For whatever reason. (The ‘why’ truly doesn’t matter except maybe to all us writers who struggle with story arcs and whatnot.)

Radical Acceptance does not mean passively allowing those challenges to overwhelm you; nor does it mean not enjoying – or, better yet, not using – the blessings you’ve received.

These days, I tend to view Radical Acceptance through the eyes of a friend who works with special ed kids in high school, ranging from those with biological challenges to those with behavioral problems.

Some of these kids, according to my friend, do well in school; others struggle. Those who struggle the most tend to be those whose parents want – or expect – their kids to be other than what they are. These parents want their kids to be “normal,” and instead of accepting their kids at their own level and taking the steps necessary to ensure their kids have the best possible future, the parents resist and place unreasonable expectations on both the school and their children.

Nobody wins. Everyone loses.

Yesterday, when I was at the doctor’s office, I saw this inability to accept kids at their own level played out by a father who was angry at his four-year-old son who was getting bored waiting and began to act out. The father, instead of meeting the son where he was emotionally and developmentally, demanded that the boy ‘behave, sit still, be quiet, or he’d get sent to the car.’

And when the boy didn’t ‘behave,’ the father hit him.

The boy still didn’t ‘behave,’ and, in fact, he began wailing, becoming much louder than he had been previously.

For me, this entire episode was avoidable. All that father had to do was acknowledge that the boy was four years old, incapable of behaving as an adult. Kids cannot still for extended periods of time.

They can’t. It’s not that they won’t, they can’t. And parents should try to remember that.

For all our sakes.

Rule of thumb: A young child can ‘sit still,’ judged by adult standards, for about a minute for every year that child’s been alive. So, for example, a four-year-old can ‘sit still,’ by adult standards, for about four minutes.

That’s it.

That inability doesn’t mean the four-year-old is required to run up and down the halls screaming after the four minutes is up, but it does mean that expecting a four-year-old to sit still and say nothing is not a reasonable expectation.

Worse, it is fighting against that child’s nature and refusing to accept – and validate – who that child is at the core.

Nobody wins, everyone loses when parents refuse to accept who and what their child is.

The father certainly lost yesterday. He was unhappy. Angry. He was bullying a four-year-old.

The child lost. He, too, was unhappy. Sad. Screaming. He’d been bullied – and rejected – by his father.

I lost, too. Not because I was particularly unhappy, but because the peace of my immediate environment was shattered needlessly.

By the father.

But…

Since I was a bystander, not part of the family, I wasn’t affected unduly. I could go home, recharge, and set the world right once again.

The boy couldn’t. And that bothered me.

I worried about how that boy would fare once he got home. Would his father berate him? Scold him? Hit him? For being four and incapable of sitting in a waiting room, hands folded in his lap – not moving, not talking – for 20 minutes?

I worried. And, no, it wasn’t child abuse per se, more like child rejection – “You’re not acceptable.”

More like conditional love – “I will love you when you behave as if you’re an adult – a well-behaved adult. And since you’re incapable of behaving that way right now, well…”

The whole episode showed – for me – the value of Radical Acceptance at all stages of life, and it reminded me of when my own kids were little. In particular, it reminded me of when my son was born.

My son is second-born. He was planned. Wanted. A joy.

And yet…

I was a second-time mother. I’d already ‘learned’ how to be a mother with my daughter. I knew, for example, that babies liked to fall asleep in their mother’s arms; that breast milk satisfied their hunger; that they started solid food at four months, liked pears; liked their alone time; and needed limited stimulation. I knew all these things. Absolutely, positively knew them.

So what a surprise it was when I brought my son home.

First thing I had to relearn: Breast milk wasn’t enough initially. I had to supplement. Second thing: He needed solid food earlier. He was hungry. And once he was older, I had to relearn how to discipline. He wasn’t his sister.

What I had to do was adjust my interaction with him based on who he was not on who his sister was. It was quite an experience.

I was – probably still am – an academic. I read. Widely. I’m familiar with the tabula rasa concept – that we enter the world as blank slates – and being a bit of an existentialist at the time, I pretty much agreed with that idea.

Not anymore.

Not since I brought my son home from the hospital. He was different than my daughter. Innately. He still is. And I still interact with them based on those differences.

The problem I had were those first few months when I thought – when I knew, absolutely knew – that babies behaved a certain way, and he was deviating. I kept trying to get him to fall asleep in my arms, the way his sister did. And it wasn’t happening. The more I tried the more frustrated the both of us got. He needed to be put in his crib.

Alone.

He needed solid food. Bottles on occasion. Stimulation through his environment. The list goes on and on.

Once I learned that he was not his sister and that babies are born with their own needs, their own way of interacting with their environment, and once I acted on what I’d learned, my life – and his – got much easier.

I wish that the father with the four-year-old would learn his son is not an adult and behave accordingly. If he would, then nobody loses.

Everyone wins.