Series on Parenting

by Deborah Hansen

Nurturing Our Emotional Connections

Our everyday patterns in life often become so entrenched that we can get lost in them. Single parents have enormous responsibilities weighing them down, between jobs, endless laundry, routine maintenance on homes and vehicles, not to mention keeping the bills paid. We retreat into bed at night exhausted, often still licking the wounds of the divorce and its effects on us and our family.

The danger in this endless cycle of movement is that it tends to obliterate our emotional connections, especially those with our children. We may think that our kids are getting what they need from us merely by our presence. We work hard and try to live our lives as good people, so our children are learning that, too, right?

Not necessarily. That might be true if we were dealing with adults, but we’re not. The thought processes of a young person are much different than those of an adult, but we tend to forget that as we get lost in those patterns driving our lives. Children think in literal terms without much interpretation or vision of those gray areas of life.

My daughter and I spent a lot of time together when I wasn’t working and she wasn’t in school. Much of that time was in the car as we drove from after school care to soccer (or basketball or softball) practices and games. She often slept as I drove from here to there, sometimes long distances for “away” games. We ate hundreds of fast food meals, not even getting out of the car to eat. We didn’t talk much, each busy with our own thoughts.

The danger here lies in the fact that I thought I knew what her thoughts were, and I assumed she knew the same about mine. I’m certainly not advocating that we share adult concerns with our children. However, I should have been sharing more of me with her: my values, my beliefs, my hopes for my life in the future as well as those for her. Parents can do this without being preachy or without lecturing. We can share stories from our past, both those in which we acted nobly and those in which we failed miserably. We can ask our children questions about their lives and then just listen. Children, like adults, sometimes just want to be heard without judgment or editorial comment.

It wasn’t until my daughter was in college that I corrected this error on my part. We met once a week for lunch and I offered one life lesson that I had learned along the way. And each week I had one question ready for her to think about: Do you want children some day? If you were mayor of our city (or president of the United States), what is one thing you would change? Do you believe in heaven? These questions, and others like them, always led to a dialogue, a chance for me to express my own views, sharing myself with her in a meaningful way.

Parents can begin nurturing these emotional connections at any time, hopefully earlier than I did. Choose your questions carefully, as they will be a way of taking the conversation in directions that are important to you and your family. Not only will you learn about each other at a deeper level, but you will create opportunities to strengthen the foundation upon which they will build their own lives as adults.

-- December 2007

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Deborah Hansen is a veteran of divorced parenting, and a former middle school teacher. She is also a certified county court mediator, and a regular columnist for several parenting publications. She may be reached for comments and suggested topics at [email protected].

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