Avoiding Parental Tunnel Vision

Remember that kid back in grade school whose parents made them bring their little sister every time they came out to play?  The big kids would have to accommodate the sister who wasn’t able to ride her bike as quickly or play the same sports.  What happened to that kid?  Eventually we stopped playing with them.  Yes, looking back we can see how cruel it was, but when you are in the thick of it you don’t want to carry around someone else’s baggage.

The so call “parental tunnel vision” is the grown up equivalent of the tag-along sibling.  As parents there is a tendency to focus our entire world onto our children, so when we talk to other people all we can think to discuss is our child’s recent dinner table disaster, their successes and failures in the walking arena, and their babbling sounds.  For our grown-up friends, especially those without children, child’s developmental milestones are not as much of a paradigm shift as they are for us.  If we dominate most of the conversation talking about baby stuff, our friends will end up bored, guaranteed.  If they start to see us as nothing more but an extension of our children (which we are, in a lot of ways) we will start to find ourselves excluded from “grown-up” activities – whether our kids come along or not!

So how do you function as a social adult when your world has been taken over by your children?  First, put yourself in your friends’ shoes.  If you were in their position would you want to be hearing about children all the time?  I don’t mean status updates and major milestones – would you want to spent hours talking about teething developments?  Or would you be thinking “Ok, your kid is normal.  Why are we talking about this?”

Naturally all bets are off when you’re talking to other parents, especially ones whose children are roughly the same age as yours.  Be careful! All those stories and comparisons can turn into a competition, so always be supportive and keep the conversation affirming and friendly.

A Beginning

A new month, a new blog.

Welcome to the Parent’s Nook, a blog about the trials and tribulations of parenthood. I hope to fill this site with a wealth of information over the coming months that other parents and parents-to-be will find useful. For the time being, I offer this “first-post” cliché article.

By way of introductions, I’d like to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about myself (I promise to keep that to a minimum!) and where I come from when approaching content for this site.

As of writing, I am a father-to-be. The little one is due to arrive at any moment now, and both I and my wife are simultaneously elated, terrified, prepared, and totally clueless when faced with what the coming years has in store for us. My wife is from a large family with a lot of children, I am not.

I noticed that almost as soon as my wife announced she was pregnant, all kind of lost relatives and otherwise strangers began to crawl out of the woodwork and offer ‘advice’ on how to conduct our new selves – the least polite among them simply point out all the ways in which we are wrong about absolutely everything. When you throw in the conflicting media messages about child safety, nutrition, BPA problems in the bottles, and industry-wide recalls on every kind of equipment, it becomes difficult to filter out what is really good advice and what is fluff.

This blog is my escape from all of that bustle. I will disseminate what I have learned and the conclusions I have come to at the end of the day. I am not a doctor, a professional childcare giver, nor anyone else with authority in these matters. I’m just a new parent figuring out the job like anyone else.

Thanks for reading through with me. I hope you will choose to come back and find some value in my writing here. I welcome comments, criticisms, complaints – please do leave your mark anywhere in the site.

Happy Parenting!