One Size Never Fits All In Parenting

Being the mom of many has been an identity I have been privileged to claim for many years. It wasn’t bestowed until after about the third. At some point, people started to look at my family funny as if we were odd and curious at the same time. However, the more attention we drew, the more I began to truly contemplate the path that life had carved out for us.

I knew from an early start that I wanted to be a mother. It probably stemmed from the same reason that my older sister chose not to have children; our own mother. We never felt that our mother was fond of being a parent. Therefore, my sister said she never wanted to make a child feel that way. I decided, however, that I would simply make sure that any child I would have would never doubt that he or she was wanted and cherished.

So, fast forward many years, and I have been blessed to be the mother of seven children. While the journey has been far from smooth and easy, I would not trade a second of it. Along the way, I learned that each and every child is unique and completely unrepeatable. There also is no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ style of parenting. There is no one approach that will work on every child as each one has different strengths, personalities and weaknesses that are all their own.

When the first two daughters were born, we attempted to follow the normal habits of putting them in daycare and then public school. This didn’t always seem like a good fit, as the girls, seemed to get lost in the shuffle of everyday life. After the third came long, I knew the typical lifestyle was no longer working. We decided to chuck the plan and start homeschooling after I went part-time at work.

Finally, the girls really started to emerge. They began to show me who they were, and they were completely different from each other. While I could simply look at one child and she would stop in her tracks, the oldest would glance at me and continue on her path. The middle was totally different as well. One day she might adopt the older one’s patterns and the next time she would respond more like the younger sister.

Once my only son was born, I was in for yet another crash course on parenting. He tossed everything I thought I knew about being a mom and showed me that I still had much to learn. I learned that a child can’t fit into a mold.

I believe that one of the reasons that my children seem to be thriving is because they are comfortable in their own skin. Yes, taking the time to learn how each child views the world takes time, but the rewards are worth the sleepless nights and worries over how to help each one find her or his own way in life.