Someone very dear to me is about to deliver her first child, a son. She is preparing for him; my instinct and need is to prepare her. There’s so much I wish I could tell her about motherhood and parenting, yet there’s no way I could even begin to encompass it all. I’ve winnowed it down to these pieces of advice:

1. For a while you will be the most important person in your son’s life. You will be his world. His eyes will light up when he sees you or hears your voice. His need for you, his absolute dependence on and reverence of you, will be humbling.
2. Your capacity for love will astound you. Your instinct and need to protect this tiny person will turn you into a momma tiger when you sense he is about to be hurt; you will gladly exchange your life for his if you think you can save him.
3. He will believe what you teach him about himself. Do you see him as smart, kind, good? If so, tell him. When he’s a teenager, he may forget these seeds you’ve planted, but the plants will eventually sprout and then bloom and then thrive.
4. Tell him the good things you see in him. Often.
5. Ensure his safety, both physical and emotional, to the best of your ability.
6. Teach him that if he gets lost, to find a mother with children, or to stop and sit down and you’ll find him.
7. Support him in doing whatever it is that he loves. Don’t let him do everything he wants.
8. Don’t stop him from feeling sadness or anger or fear or guilt; these emotions will teach him about himself and about life. It will be hard to see him suffer these emotions, Momma Tiger, but you must.
9. Don’t make him the center of your life. Instead, show him that sometimes he’s the center, sometimes he’s not.
10. Show him the importance of family.
11. Teach him to respect adults.
12. When he’s about 11, his devotion to you will change; it needs to change. For a period of time, his friends will be more important. One day – if you’ve taught him well – his wife or partner will be. This can hurt, Momma Tiger. But you must encourage it to happen … it’s how he’ll eventually find out how much he can love. And this – realizing the depth of our capacity to love –  is the gift of this lifetime.
13. You are grooming him for all future relationships with women. Teach him that we are trustworthy, dependable and strong. Teach him that there will be times when even strong women need someone’s arms around them, saying, “Everything’s going to be all right. I’ve got you.”
14. Love him even when he’s hard to like.
15. Hold him responsible and accountable. This is how he learns that he is.
16. Model for him how to deal with conflict; he will learn this by watching the adults in his home. Teach him to talk it out rather than fight it out, punch it out or numb it.
17. Forgive.
18. Forgive again.
19. Teach him to laugh at himself. This makes life so much easier and a lot more fun. If he’s like me, he’ll have enough material to keep himself amused his entire life.
20. Apologize to him when you’ve made a mistake, but not for setting limits, having an opinion or saying no.
21. Say no.
22. Let him experience the consequences of his choices; this is how he’ll learn what is right and what is wrong.
23. Teach him to believe in something bigger than himself.
24. Help him see his gentleness; help him see his strength.
25. Imagine the man in the boy; remember the boy in the man.
26. Enjoy him.
27. And finally … relax … you’re going to do great.

I think these are pretty good parenting guidelines; I certainly can look back to when I didn’t see the importance of some of them and instead learned them the hard way. I expect I’ll keep adding to the list as life goes on, which probably means a lot more mistakes from me. Sigh.

Looking simplistically at psychotherapy, many of these things are what we attempt to show, teach or experience with our patients.

Imagine the healing and growth that can come when we do.

What’s a parent to do?

The recent Newsweek cover story on psychological hazards of Internet use and other “screen time” activities (such as texting and playing videogames) leaves one wondering whether to cut all electric power to one’s home or just wait till the next study comes out contradicting what we think we now know.

I can only imagine how most parents feel. I’m confused, and I’m a psychologist. And a researcher! 

The Newsweek article is definitely worth a read. To summarize: Various forms of screen time have been linked to depression, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder and diaper rash (OK, that last one’s not true, but the rest are).

More alarming to me, as a father of two boys born with silver joysticks in their hands (sorry, another slight exaggeration), there is also brain imaging research showing changes in the brains of heavy Internet users that resemble those of drug addicts. A separate study showed that the brains of non-users began to resemble those of heavy users after only five hours of Internet use (this I am not making up). 

On the other hand…

We see a story in TechNewsDaily about a new study from the University of Wisconsin showing that prior research findings of a “Facebook depression” effect may not be as dire as previously thought. They monitored 190 undergraduates over the course of a week; after dividing the sample into groups of low (less than 30 minutes per day), medium and high Facebook users (more than 2 hours per day), they found no differences in depressed mood. 

What’s a parent to do? Here’s where the media often overreact, suggesting, for example, that if eating eggs is shown to be not quite as deadly as previous studies indicated, then perhaps all health-related research is a bogus game of flip-flopping in response to the fad of the day. But we can do better than that.

So, short of throwing out both baby and bathwater, here are some thoughts, admittedly delivered with only a modicum of confidence (probably more in role of father than psychologist):

1. Most studies of effects of electronic activities, from violent videogames to Facebook activity, show increased risk of harmful effects, not one-to-one correspondence. One implication is that it is the at-risk kids, those already on the margins due to adverse histories and challenging living conditions, that we should be most worried about. As one of the researchers in the Facebook study commented, “Parents don’t have to be overly concerned [as long as] their child’s behavior and mood haven’t changed, they have friends and their school work is consistent.”
2. If your child is at-risk – struggling socially or academically – particular attention needs to be paid to addressing that child’s needs, including significant monitoring of screen time. Studies show, for example, that economically disadvantaged children tend to spend more time engaged in electronic activities than their more affluent counterparts.
3. Even if your child has all the advantages of economic security, stable home life and good adjustment at school, you’re still not off the hook as a parent. It is impossible to read the Newsweek article (not to mention actually watching a young person at a computer) without becoming convinced that various forms of electronic entertainment, from videogames to online pornography, have significant addictive properties. Excellent resources are available from such sources as the American Academy of Pediatrics or SafeKids.com, providing guidance for parents. Foremost among safe practices is parent involvement, including having the computer and other electronic gear in a public area such as your den, where you can easily monitor what your child is up to (this is sometimes quite interesting, by the way).
4. Insist that your children spend at least as much time in the real world (face-to-face conversation, shooting an actual basketball through an actual hoop, etc.) as in the virtual world (expect mainly contempt in reply, at least until the first swish of the basketball net).
5. This last point brings up an important issue (caution: psychologist hat now firmly in place). Children’s electronic activities are highly rewarding (behaviorally reinforcing), not just for children, but also for parents. Child activities that are otherwise annoying, intrusive and inconvenient (such as actually wanting to talk to you) drop to negligible levels when the child’s mind is absorbed in a virtual environment (often interacting with someone across town or even on the other side of the globe). This peace and quiet can, in itself, become quite addictive to parents; but, in large quantities, it is a definite no-no to anyone interested in the child’s mental health, not to mention a reasonable relationship with said child.

I will be interested to see comments in response to this post. If someone has better answers than these (a fairly likely scenario), then my time engaged in this particular session of screen time will have been well worth it.

I have a confession. I am not the perfect mother, and I never will be. The bad news is that I am not even striving for perfection in mothering.

This may shock some people who have been caught in the wake of my self-proclaimed perfectionism. It is true that in most things I have a difficult time letting go of the glossy ideals I hold in my head, but in this case I make a continual and constant effort to just be “good enough.” I believe that this is one area where my training as a therapist has been beneficial to me.

In the world of psychoanalysis there is a wonderful theory about the “good enough mother.”¹ This is a theory, developed by Donald Winnicott, I hold close to my heart. Among other things, Donald Winnicott was a pediatrician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. In his time, psychoanalysts were primarily Freudians, Klienians or part of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He found himself in the last group with the likes of another favorite of mine, John Bowlby.

A theory to live by

Winnicott’s theory describes “the ordinary devoted mother … as an example of the way in which the foundations of health are laid down by the ordinary mother in her ordinary loving care of her own baby.” The beauty of this theory lies in its simplicity and attainability. He is basically saying that all an ordinary baby needs to develop into a healthy separate being, who is capable of mature object-relations, is an ordinary mother who can respond to her baby’s needs.

This I can do. I can listen to my instincts and be good enough to help my daughter navigate the complicated world of self formation. I am imperfect and my daughter will be imperfect. I hope to embrace this about myself and her so that she develops a sense of grace and forgiveness toward herself and others.

“Good enough” in other realms, too

I have applied this theory to other areas of my life as well. Last year we celebrated the “good enough” Christmas, one that was scaled down from Martha Stewartesque grandiosity to a more realistic family gathering. Because I was able to let go of that ideal of the perfect Christmas, I was able to be attuned to my daughter’s first Christmas and everything she was experiencing. If I had been racing around in last-minute preparations, I would have missed so much.

In addition to having a very full professional and personal life, I am also an avid volunteer in my community, and this year I’ve become the “good enough” volunteer. I have let go of some of the groups that I previously gave my time to and have selected the few that are most meaningful to me. This allows me to really focus on the time I am give to these causes as well as the friendships of those who serve with me rather than begrudging the time away from my other daily tasks.

Just as in rearing children, sometimes our efforts to be perfect cause us to miss the point, and our extra effort is not necessarily rewarded.

I hope my friends who are new moms can embrace this theory as well. The world makes being a woman hard enough. I have watched friends struggle with trying to live up to so many different ideals as we traverse different stages of our lives. Most of these we have successfully navigated, and I feel so blessed to have a network of strong females in my life.

As many of us begin the new role of parenting, I see old anxieties coming back. I see everyone working so hard to get it right and to be such great mothers. I wish I could tell them that they already have what it takes to be a great mother and that they are already doing what it takes to be good enough.

Reference

¹Winnicott, Donald W. (1956). Primary maternal preoccupation. In Collected Papers, through paediatrics to psychoanalysis (pp. 300-305). London: Travistock Publications, 1958.