September 18, 2018

There Is No Right Way To Parent

All parenting journeys share this in common: before you meet your child, you have no clue what will resonate with them. Which is why articles about how you should parent, discipline, or communicate with your child may offer helpful tips, but are never absolutes.

You don’t know what your child will respond to until you get to know your child. And even then, they will change quite a bit as they get older.

Adoptive parents are forced to confront this a lot throughout their adoption process. They’re asked to comment on what kind of parents they’ll be, how they’ll raise their kids, the kind of home they plan to create. Parenting is an incredibly easy thing to have an opinion about (and oh so many do), but in practice, it’s a whole other ballgame. Parenting is incredibly hard work, a full time job with all the rewards and none at all. But what it’s not is a given. An absolute. A sure thing through and through.

So when your social worker, or potential birth mother, or friend or family member asks you “how are you going to parent your child?” — you can tell them how you’d like to parent. The qualities you aim to bring, and what resonated with you as a child. But then you can talk about how you really have no idea. How you’ll bend and pivot based on the needs of a human you’ve never met. How you hope to be patient with yourself, because in the very judgmental world of parenting, you don’t need to add to your own cast of critics. And how, hey, would they mind helping out sometime if you need it? Because you probably definitely will. Parenting is hard, why all this pressure to do it on our own?

In the meantime, you can focus on not worrying. Because you want to be a parent, and that is a big giant leap towards being a really good one. At the end of the day, we’re all trying to raise happy, healthy kids who can be productive members of society. Does it really matter how we get there?