Adventures in Parenting

I learned a lesson today from my dirty shower.

I looked at my shower stall with my glasses on last week, and saw mold growing in the corners. It’s time to take out the tile cleansers and spray it down. When I checked a few hours later, the stains were still there. So I sprayed the shower with bleach, filling the room with that locker room smell. To my dismay, the mold remained.

As much as I had hoped to avoid it, I reluctantly took a scrub pad, went into the shower stall, and put elbow grease on the tile and the grout. Finally, the tile was sparkling clean.

The parenting experience is like that sometimes. We would like to think raising kids is easy. Feed them, take them to school, buy them some educational software for them to learn, and they’ll turn out fine.

But sometimes, parenting requires more. It demands us to get personally involved, to put in some hard work. It may mean giving up our personal time in order to give our children more attention. Perhaps we need to get involved in school, find out who their friends are, and take a closer look at what they are doing on the computer.

We tend to allow the school to take our much of our parenting responsibilities. If our child is getting good grades at school, and if we don’t hear bad news from the teacher, we assume our child is doing fine. But that is not necessarily so. Perhaps it’s time to put our glasses on, roll up our sleeves, get more involved in our children’s lives, spend time listening to them, and figure out how we can encourage our children in all aspects of their growth.