Spiritual Parenting ©2005 Joan M. McCabe

My philosophy is that I’ve manufacturer my kids’ bodies, but they’re the drivers of their own physical vehicles. I’ve given them some rudimentary driving lessons, but they’re the ones with the keys, and they inherently know the route they’re taking through this lifetime. I also believe they accumulate experiences to prepare them for wherever they’re going.

Unlike those who view children as blank slates or as lumps of clay that require molding, I see them as treasure chests of wondrous knowledge. My inclination with my children is to step back and see what they reveal to me, and it is continuously miraculous what they come up with.

My eldest and I had some challenges when he was younger, some of it being basic personality styles. He gets energized being around people, I get depleted. He’s high testosterone, very athletic, likes team sports. I’m very self-contained and like to meditate. Early on I saw a potentially unhealthy dynamic and realized I had to change some patterns. One decision I made is that I was ‘on his side’. I saw myself as his advocate in situations with school and sports. Even if we disagreed on something, I still held the space of being ‘on his side’. The other decision I made was to not give him anything to rebel against. I had some bottom-line rules (no bloodshed in the house, and no football in the house as well) but practiced non-resistance about anything else. I also developed a technique of ‘aikido’ so that any energy coming my way I would step aside and let pass. He could get angry, but with no resistance on my part to fan the flames, it would subside quickly.

What developed was a child who is very self-disciplined and self-directed, who is well aware of his passions and his abilities. He has the space to make his own decisions and determine his own direction through this life. He finds great joy in things that hold no interest for me, but I fully support him in pursuing. I’ve spend many a freezing evening watching a sporting event whose rules are incomprehensible to me, hearing his name mentioned many times over the loud speaker for what, I don’t know, because I love my son.

My youngest requires a different parenting style but has always been easier to live with. There was only one time where we had a disagreement (in Barnes & Noble, when I insisted that he pick out a gift for a friend’s birthday party) and I discovered a will stronger than mine – we would have sat there until closing time if I hadn’t capitulated. He’s self contained, like me, and requires a lot of ‘down time’ to recover from school. His passion is movies and he intends on being a filmmaker. He’s also a phenomenal writer, with a sarcastic tone saved for school papers whose topics he deems unchallenging (which are most of them).

Another aspect of my ‘hands-off’ approach to parenting is that I never pester them about their homework. I asked my youngest the other day how he’d feel if I did nag him about it and he said ‘I wouldn’t feel like doing it!’
Both of my kids are ‘self-made men’ in their own unique way. The oldest is a straight-A student, very ‘nose-to-the-grindstone’ about his studies. He reads a book a week to ‘exercise his brain’, leave the house at 5:30am to lift weights before school, is a varsity athlete in three different sports, and is taking Russian as an independent study for his school language. The youngest gets straight-As because it’s easy (he could read at an 11th grade level in 5th grade), and is presently working on his fourth screen play (I think he’s waiting until he’s in high school to start actually filming his work, although he did a pretty good version of the ‘Blair Witch Project’ on his dad’s camcorder when he was in elementary school).

To me this is all the more amazing considering the circumstances they came from. Their dad was a covert cocaine addict until the youngest was a year old (now many years in recovery), so the atmosphere in the house back then was crazy. They weathered the divorce and loss of the house they were born in, and seven moves (between both parents’ homes) in seven years.

Sometimes I wonder how I’d feel if one or both of my kids take a U-turn from their present paths into drugs and acting out (something that has worried me since it’s in their family background and both their parents were practically juvenile delinquents at their ages). In imagining such things, I see myself as still loving them and also detaching from their behavior. If they choose to drive their vehicles down such roads, they’ll definitely be learning something from the result of their actions!

I see them as capable beings who’ve each chosen the circumstances they came into, as part of the required experiences they intended to accumulate to help them get to wherever they’re ending up going to. I see them as collecting both spiritual and social merit badges in a surprisingly balanced way. I’m quite curious to see what routes they’ll be taking and what sights they’ll be seeing on this adventurous journey called life.