observation
Parenting is in the details
My 13-year-old daughter is a child of nature. After planting a new garden, she has been asking to borrow my phone to document its growth. As I was searching for an old photo on my phone, I came across a series of remarkable images that she had captured. So observant and detailed were they, that my breath was taken away. She has spent many moments of the last few years sitting quietly in the garden and watching every plant and creature come to life–noting their shapes, their colors, their gestures–taking stock of their progress and nurturing them according to what she sees that they need. With eager care she attends to every yellowing leaf, every blooming flower, every burgeoning fruit. She is a good mother to her patch of green and you can see it in how well it is thriving.
One of the great gifts of the pandemic was that many of us have finally got the chance to slow down. Never was ‘stop and smell the roses’ more relevant. In my home, slowing down has meant that we reaffirmed and embraced rhythms that had gone slack. We were able to take our time and devote the care and attention to tasks that sometimes were rushed. Now given the opportunity, work that was sometimes cumbersome has become enjoyable and we’ve graduated from getting it done, as we do when life is busier, to doing it with art and grace. For me, most rare of all, being home has provided an opportunity in my family life for the consideration and reflection that is borne of observational experience.
Each year, I eagerly await the publication of the new wave of parenting books and manuals. As a teacher, they inform my understanding of child development and increase my toolbox of skills both at home and in my professional life. At the beginning of my parenting journey, I felt reliant on these infusions of information and perspective to guide me as I navigated life with my children. Several books became permanent fixtures on my nightstand, curled and creased, spines permanently marked by space at the pages that I visited most. Over time, I came to feel that more than increasing my intellectual grasp of growth and development, these books were reinforcing something that I had already come to know by simply being with my children. Over and over again, I had the experience of going to book in a moment of crisis and finding that I had arrived at the same conclusion in my parenting decisions as the ones that I was reading. After many such occasions, I came to accept that there was a wisdom in my instincts and even more than that, a great education in parenting that my own children were providing for me if I was willing to slow down and observe. Books are a wonderful tool to help us understand our child’s development, why they work the way they do, and to help us hone our parenting art. But books are most effective if we read them to as an external enhancement and reinforcement of our inward knowing and practices.
Children do not arrive with a manual, but to some degree, we have one imprinted in us as a matter of human design. It is there, latent—waiting to be awoken or stimulated when our babies arrive. Currently, in first world cultures, we spend a great deal of intellectual resources in studying child development, physical, social, and emotional, and constantly reassessing parenting approaches to meet children in these ever-changing times. We adopt strategies and philosophies to guide us and to help us navigate and balance what our children encounter as they grow. In other parts of the world, where resources are inaccessible, and where the nature of life is vastly different, parents still manage to parent effectively based on passed down wisdoms, and instincts stimulated by what they are seeing before them. My mother, born in a Kashmiri village, was raised to be a mother. At the time, education was inaccessible to girls, so she did not study past eighth grade and never read a single parenting book. I am constantly amazed at the wisdom that was in her parenting. Her instincts, her modeling, and her observation of us were her tools. Sometimes I have felt that trusting my books over my observations led me to make parenting choices that were formulaic and made sense in my head, but were not at all addressing my particular child, and as similar as my child may be to any other, there is not another one like them in the world.
Observation is one of the greatest, least spoken of, parenting tools that we have. Creating space for observation in our lives can shift and shape the way that we parent and the way that we are in all our relationships. To truly engage this tool, we have to trust in our knowing and acknowledge that our experience can get in the way. Somewhere within us is the instinct for parenting. For those of us who have had relatively healthy childhoods, that knowing emerges with ease. For others of us, the knowing is clouded by our experience, and we learn that in order to parent our children, we have to first parent ourselves and remove some of the cloudy layers to let the knowing emerge. For true observation to be possible, we have to work through our own biography and distinguish our childhood experiences from that of our children so that our experiences do not hold us back from seeing our children as they truly are.
We must also trust in our leadership as parents. We are responsible for guiding our children and modeling a healthy life for them so that we can nurture them towards their own future and eventually set them to sail in their own course. Like any good leader, we have to get to know them in detail—their strengths and their challenges—so that we can help them balance out and feel well equipped before they embark on their own journeys.
Rhythm creates space for observation, so we must strive to establish one that works. Rhythm helps us to slow down and naturally builds pauses into our lives. When we move with a deeply ingrained rhythm, we no longer have to engage our entire being in survival but can redirect our senses and our intellect to enjoying and observing the content. It is worth saying again that the pauses in the rhythm are as important as the activity. Pauses are filled with more opportunities for observation and space for the thinking and reflection that lead to healthy parenting decisions.
Repetition, repetition, repetition. Doing anything over and over again gives us a chance to revisit and revise. It gives our children an opportunity to achieve mastery and to feel grounded. It also gives us a chance to see how our children do when we make changes, no matter how subtle, based on our continuing observation of them. Seeing your child repeatedly in any circumstance, you get to know their needs and hone your approach based on how they engage, react, and feel.
To heighten our observational senses, we also need to practice presence. We have much to learn from our children. As their sense of time is yet emergent, they are the most present. For them, there is only the here and now. Sensory observation is their primary source of learning for the first three years. They see and hear and feel everything and are attuned to the world around them. For a child this openness paired with their keen interest in the world can be overwhelming. For a parent, this quality of presence can nurture parental empathy and can support in understanding and in communicating with their child.
Parenting with a full cup is aways more effective than parenting with an empty one. To really make space for observational parenting, we must take care of ourselves as parents and make sure that our needs are met. Hungry, tired, stressed parents often function in survival mode and have little bandwidth to stop and observe their child before making choices. When you feel cared for and are no longer concerned with staying afloat, you have the patience and time for the noble task of meeting your child.
Caterpillar
Caterpillar, crawly, creepy
Hungry, hungry, sleepy, sleepy
How you move now slowly slowly
In your blanket sleepy rolly
Warm the sunshine dozy dozy
Wind it rocks you to and frowsy
Now its time to wakey, wakey
Your new wings so shaky, shaky
Stretch, stretch, stretch, wings unfold
Beautiful butterfly shimmering gold
Flutter, flutter off you fly
Brightly, spritely in the sky
— Anjum Mir