Modern parenting

Mark Krueger

The other day, in the coffee shop where I write early in the morning, including this column, I watched a father and his son, perhaps six or seven years old, have breakfast. They come almost every morning and sit across from each other, usually silent as they wake into the day. It is as if they are doing the same thing I am doing, having private moments in public, the rumble in the background in some way quieting the existential hum and connecting them to community. Sometimes a friend of the fathers stops and talks while the son nibbles quietly on his muffin, or reads his book, his curious eyes looking over the pages. I can’t help but wonder what is going on in his mind. Or, imagine what I might have been thinking at that age: probably our family vacation up north or what I would do when I could go to school and other places by myself, or drive a car.

It also reminds me of the days when I had “morning duty” with my son, and watched him through the years grow from a talkative boy into a quiet, often grumpy adolescent. Suzanne painted late into the night and liked to sleep in the morning then be available when he walked home for lunch and after school while I was still at work.

Like Piaget, I studied childhood and adolescence in part through watching him and the mood swings and intellectual and physical changes he went through and what he did or did not want to talk about at breakfast. Oh how happy I was when I no longer had to help him ties his shoes, find his mittens and get ready to go to school in the cold; now of course sometimes I miss those days, although our conversations now seem much deeper and richer than the grunts he exchanged with me as an adolescent when half awake he struggled to get his rapidly changing mind and body off to school where the world was unfolding with his peers. I am once again reasonably smart and wise to him; whereas then my stature seemed to have dwindled as he developed his abstract/hypothetical/deductive reasoning powers in the world that was opening wider and wider than our increasingly smaller and boring neighborhood.

This boy seems comparatively quiet for his age although I am aware each child has a different temperament. His book and imagination keep him busy. I was sort of that way as a boy. My mother fed me in the morning with food, stories she made up to get me to eat oatmeal, and words of wisdom. I would listen and then make up my own stories in my head. My father was usually off to work at the company before I got up. He was a loyal company employee: his greatest fear perhaps losing his job. My mother, an early feminist (flapper) ahead of her time, worked except when my brother and I were school age boys, and then she would get us off to school before she drove to the grade school where she was the principal’s secretary who, as most of the students knew, ran the place. Despite her small stature, no one messed with my mother. She too had worked through the depression and knew what it meant to take education seriously. Students who fooled around could be sitting on the bench in the office where she would give them a lecture about the importance of their learning. Most did not return to that seat in the office. From her I got a sense of persistence and caring discipline that helped me as a youth worker. I also got a big supply of energy.

In the coffee shop several other men, childless perhaps, often congregate near the water cooler and accoutrements, take out cups of coffee in their hands, discussing the economy before they rush off to work during the current recession. You can sense their anxiety. At other tables women often sit longer discussing the challenges at their business and/or in the non profit community.

Whether these changes have been good or bad for child rearing in general is of course a topic of much debate. In many ways I do wish the US had policies that would give women and men more time off to raise their kids during the formative years. This would go a long way in preventing problems in the future, unless of course children, like many children in our community, had parents who were not able to raise them. Giving them more time to be home with their kids would be disastrous without providing equal attention and support for the parents.

I can not understand why we don’t have higher standards and/or expectations for having and raising children in our country. We regulate, set standards, and have higher expectations for far less important activities. Anyone, despite their readiness or capacity to support another being it seems can have a kid. This of course is another very controversial topic. I am not sure what the ultimate solution is other than more and more education, less poverty, higher expectations, making child rearing a priority, investment in support services, and qualified Child and Youth Care workers.

A few days ago while driving somewhere I heard a story about a young teenage couple with two children living with the girl’s mother and her brothers in a small house in Baltimore. The father had been unable to get a job and she was pregnant again. During the interview they emphasized that unlike the vast majority of people with kids in their neighborhood at least they were trying to stay together. For how long I wondered, and what will happen to those kids? There is always hope, but the prognosis based on statistics is not good.

But that day, as on other days, with many unanswered questions about how and who should parent, whether it is better today or in the past, I enjoyed watching this boy and his father. In reflection, there is something good about it, the way they are together in their silence in the world around them as they move into the day. He seems like a good dad, a man concerned enough to make sure his son has breakfast before he goes off to school, a man who wants his son to grow up as a responsible and fulfilled youth. I wish the youth whom I had worked with had had fathers like this. After they left, I reflected on them, my childhood, and my experience as a parent, and wrote a poem.

Muffin eaten while his dad
talks to another man
a boy fidgets makes faces
daydreams and waits

The father in work clothes
delays momentarily the duty
bestowed on him to get
"the kid” off to school

In the background clustered
around the water cooler
other men in suits and ties
tell jokes sheltered
from the rains of recession

Having survived the depression
my father left for the company
before the rest of us got up

And my mother, a working
woman and flapper ahead of her time
after making and serving breakfast
to her boys, soon followed

Now the women often leave
before the men both longing
to linger in the daydreams
they once had

When morning opened
to possibility in the sounds
that circled around them