Between Parent and Child

I’ve been reading the revised Between Parent and Child by Haim Ginott (originally published 1965).

I bought it in a moment of sheer and spectacular defeat. The three-year-old was having tantrums that involved throwing himself down in the middle of the road (we were crossing it at the time, I don’t let him play there, not yet that defeated) screaming “I don’t like you! I’m not coming with you!” And this is out the front of his day care centre as I’m trying to take him home.

Tearfully (me this time) I went to Ask Moxie, a site that’s seen me through many less-than-stellar parenting phases, and found a lot of people recommending this book.

“Love is not enough. Insight is insufficient,” says Ginott in his introduction. “Good parents need skill.”

This is possibly the most enlightening sentence about parenting that I’ve ever read. If love were enough then we would have the most amazing parent-child relationship out there. I cannot possibly love my child more than I do. If love were all it took then it must be that I don’t love him enough.

What a relief, what a wonderful release this one sentence provided from the guilt attached to the constant feeling that I’m getting it wrong; the sense of failure because I mustn’t be insightful enough, mustn’t be an instinctual mother.

Treat everyone with the same respect as you would a guest, says Ginott. And put this way it’s easy to see how by default I’ve fallen into disrespect of my child and partner at times, how I’ve taken them so much for granted that I was nicer to the woman at the fruit shop than I was to the people I love.

To be fair, the woman at the fruit shop doesn’t wake me up three times a night asking for a glass of milk, or ignore me for hours on end, or think that running a damp cloth over the toilet seat constitutes cleaning the bathroom, so I don’t have excuses to lose it with her.

But neither does she say “I love you mummy, can you give me a very tight huggle?” or bring me kilos of chocolate in anticipation of PMT. (Sorry fruit lady, if you’re reading this and feeling a little used for the purposes of making a point.)

Particularly useful in terms of coping with my partner’s depression at times is the acknowledgment and reflection of feelings. Ginott says that it’s more helpful to mirror feelings than to offer solutions or criticism (and sometimes the latter is inherent in the former).

It’s more appropriate for me to say: “That guy at work is really annoying. It sounds so frustrating having all that extra work piled on,” rather than: “Why don’t you say something about it?”

I mean, he’s an adult in his 40s. Obviously he’s heard of assertiveness and if he felt that he could use it in this situation then he would have.

This doesn’t make his depressed feelings go away on the day (sorry, I have to keep repeating this kind of thing but the fix-it-fix-it-fix-it is so entrenched in my head that I have to bludgeon another path through it) but at least I’m not frustrated with him and he doesn’t infer that I think he’s an idiot.

Flo