A friend sent me a really great article on parenting. It was called Raising Your Successful 35-Year-Old. In the age of helicopter parents, it talked about being a lighthouse parent–where the goal isn’t to constantly hover and fix, but to be visible for your children as they navigate their own smooth or choppy waters.

Because while we want to protect our children from harm,

what we too often end up doing is protecting them from learning.

Our job is to keep them from drowning, but not do the sailing for them. Wanting to protect our children is completely different from being able to. I think we’ve begun to believe, that if we are the perfect parents we can keep our children safe, although it might come at the expense of our sanity and our children’s autonomy.

The truth is, we are never completely in control. There are things like luck and chance in the world. Sometimes they are good, sometimes they are not. They are always the wild card. Perhaps the best we can do is be the light that allows our children to see what they are really up against. And if we’re really lucky, they will also have paid attention to what we’ve illuminated about ourselves.

Any thoughts?

Tags: children, control, growing up, growth, helicopter parenting, Kim Sabatini, Kimberly Sabatini, learning, lighthouse parenting, parenting

Comments

If you normally follow my blog, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been blogging recently. And most likely you know the reason. But I’m not going to assume you do, so if you’d like to read my last blog post before my blogging draught you can find it here–A Person’s a Person No Matter How Small: An Open Letter to the Wappingers Central School District.

There are a lot of reasons why I’ve been stuck trying to write a new post…

*That last post was the most important thing I had to say. It was epic.

*I’ve been busy supporting my kids through the ups and downs of this experience.

*I’ve been insanely angry–so much so–I have yet to figure out what to productively do with those feelings.

*I’ve been processing, growing, and trying to be the best version of myself right now. It’s taken a lot of energy. Growing is hard.

*I’ve had a cold–still sniffling.

*And I’ve been sad. I have not had the liberty to languish in that sadness in front of my children, because I’ve had to don my super hero cape, even when it felt like fraud. So the sad has infiltrated my words more than it has anywhere else in my life. And more than anything, what I want to write about on this blog is my heartbreak and my feelings, but it’s not the right place for that at the moment. In time, that emotion will bleed into my books, where it belongs.

But that has left me with little to say in this space as I curl up and lick my wounds.

BUT IT’S TIME.

So I planned to just JUMP IN and write my conference blog today. I was going to leap back in, cold turkey, but pictures wouldn’t load and all kinds of other technical crap held me up. Then I realized what I really needed was to write about why I couldn’t write. Address the elephant in the room. “Hello, Elephant.”

Not as easy as it sounds, I’ve been staring at that pachyderm all morning with very little success–but sometimes the act of butt-in-chair and fingers in motion is how you get started when you don’t have the words. The day’s not over yet. I’m getting there–the right words will come.

And I will kick elephant butt.

It’s what I do.

*No elephants or their butts were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Back on Tuesday with a #NY14SCBWI conference recap.

And thank you for…everything. I mean it–you don’t know what your support means to me. (((((hugs))))))

Tags: A Person's a Person, anger, blogging, elephant butt, growth, Kim Sabatini, Kimberly Sabatini, sadness, WCSD, writing

Comments