Teacher Tom: "Parenting is About Growing"

Teacher Tom: "Parenting is About Growing"

"Parenting is About Growing"

One evening, before we were parents, my wife and I were invited to a dear friend's house for dinner. We hadn't seen her in years, nor met her husband or child, who was at the time about 12 months old. Jennifer must have been pregnant at the time, but it was still new enough that we hadn't yet turned our attentions to our future as parents in any meaningful way.

There was a bowl full of decorative wooden balls on the coffee table. At one point the baby purposefully dumped the balls onto the floor. To our shock, her parents didn't attempt to correct her obvious misbehavior, but rather seemed to find it cute, especially as she began to put the balls back into the bowl again, one by one. When the bowl was full, she then dumped it again. She repeated the process of dumping then refilling that bowl over and over and over for what seemed like a half hour. On the way home that evening, my wife and I agreed that the poor child was cute, but clearly no Einstein.

Of course, today I would have been impressed by the capacity for a child that young to focus on a single self-selected task for such a long time, noting her fine motor skills and emerging mathematical mind. And while this girl has grown into a brilliant and accomplished young woman, it's quite clear that I have also grown quite a bit in my own right.

As Mister Rogers reminds us, "Parents don't come full bloom at the birth of their first baby. In fact, parenting is about CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: "Parenting is About Growing"