In Which I Attempt to Explain What I've Done to NOT Screw Up My Kids So Far

When wasting time on Facebook instead of doing something useful like dusting my house (don't ask me when I last did that), I often run across articles detailing how hard it is to raise good, honest kids these days. Society has gone downhill, they say. There are so many temptations and opportunities for kids to grow up way before their time. There are 8 year olds running around with smartphones and accidentally happening upon porn. It seems that often the conclusion is that you either need to homeschool your kids, never give them phones, and keep them away from those things for as long as possible or you need to give in to the inevitable and try to minimize the damage. We've managed to find a middle way with our kids (at least so far), and an incident that happened regarding Squirrelboy last night and into this morning has compelled me to write about that. Even in this fairly anonymous space I don't want to share the details of this incident. The basic outline is that it was communicated to Squirrelboy's principal that he was the instigator of an event of which he was actually the reporter. The incident took place outside another high school, to which Squirrelboy takes a bus in the afternoon to transfer to a bus to our neighborhood. Thanks to a lot of phone calls made by both me and Mr. Engineer last night and by Squirrelboy's principal this morning, the truth was sorted out by 8am when his principal had scheduled a meeting with all of us. Squirrelboy received a fervent apology and the principal is committed to finding out how the message was transmitted so badly and what needs to happen districtwide so that another good kid doesn't end up getting blamed for something he or she bravely reports. What really struck me during the meeting, however, was that both the principal and the vice principal told us that, when they heard the allegation, they knew Isaac was not the kind of kid who would do that. This is his first year at this school and school has been in session for just over a month, so I think the fact that the administrators of his school already know he's a person of good character says a lot about him. I know he's a good kid, of course, but I'm his mom. I'm biased. We're not done raising him yet, but I think the fact that we've gotten him all the way to 14 and both people who know him well and people who are just getting to know him comment on his good character is an accomplishment worth noting.

So what did we do? I'm actually going to start with what we didn't do. We didn't let him watch whatever movies and TV shows he wanted to watch, even if it seemed like all of his peers were watching them. We have always carefully curated the media both he and his sister are exposed to. And by that I don't mean we decided upon a particular rating level we wouldn't let him watch. When he asked about watching something, we would read about it and, if we were still unsure, we would watch the first episode with him. For example, he started watching Downtown Abbey, which is rated TV-14, at 11 because he was very interested in this historical aspect and we decided the positives of what he could learn through the show outweighed the negatives of the occasional mature content. However, the rule was that either I had to have watched the episode previously or we had to watch it together. That enabled me to talk through the mature content with him either as we were watching an episode or before he watched it. He's watched a carefully curated selection of R rated movies with a parent (sometimes with a scene or two skipped over) because we believe those movies held an important lesson for him. However, there are some popular PG movies that he hasn't seen and will have to wait until he's an adult to see and can make his own media choices because we don't think he needs that garbage in his brain. Another thing we didn't do was let him play a lot of video games. He went through a brief obsession with Minecraft, but even then we tightly controlled how much time he could spend on Minecraft and made sure it didn't supersede his other interests. He is now completely baffled by the fact that so many of his peers are obsessed with video games. We also didn't get him a phone until he was in 8th grade. Even then, we didn't give him internet access on the phone until he could make a good case for needing it for a practical reason. We still only let him use preapproved apps and don't let him watch YouTube or other videos on his phone. We haven't let him get any social media accounts, even though most of his friends have had them for years, well before the official internet age of consent of 13. Keeping him off social media takes away one potential bullying space as well as one potential space for being exposed to content we believe is inappropriate for his still developing brain.

Our parenting hasn't been all about negatives, however. One important thing HAVE done is spend a lot of time with him. That's easy for me since I've been a stay at home mom his whole life, but Mr. Engineer always makes spending time and making memories with the kids a priority (often to the detriment of projects around the house getting completed). We've instituted a family culture in which honesty and integrity are valued. We read to him (even now that he's a high schooler) and we talk about what we read. Sometimes characters in books have a lot to teach us, either because they made the right decisions or because they made all the wrong decisions. We also talk to him about why we aren't letting him watch or listen to or play some things his friends have told him are totally awesome. We talk to him about the kind of man we hope and pray he grows up to be and how we hope the way we're parenting will help him become that kind of man. We also take him to church and Sunday School, but we don't leave his religious education to the church alone. We read scripture with him and pray with and for him. We talk about how our faith plays a role in the decisions we make. His good character isn't only due to what we've done, however. Another important aspect is what he has learned through his involvement with the Boy Scouts of America. Mr. Engineer is an Eagle Scout, and the values he learned through scouting stay with him today. He wanted the same for Squirrelboy, and Squirrelboy joined a Cub Scout pack (with Mr. Engineer as his adult partner) in first grade, the first year he was eligible. The BSA motto includes a promise to keep oneself "physically fit, mentally awake, and morally straight." The BSA law states that, among other things, a scout is trustworthy and loyal. Unfortunately, there are people who go all the way through BSA and even sometimes people who serve as leaders who don't truly live these principles. However, Squirrelboy has had an amazing experience with adults who really want the boys to understand and live the motto and the law. I think with our family dynamic Squirrelboy could have turned out just as honest and trustworthy as he is without scouting, but his scouting experience is a wonderful complement to what we're doing and has helped him learn to live out principles we believe in even when he's not around us.

Poor Kittygirl has been basically ignored in this entry. She's only 8, and there have been fewer opportunities in her life for us to see what we're doing right. However, the thing I'm struck with about her is that she's a really good friend. We must be doing things mostly right with her as well when I hear from other parents at her school that she's kind to everyone and everyone likes her. We're raising her in about the same way as we raised to her brother, though, to his chagrin, we've loosened up a little bit on the media part, due in large part to the fact that she's not as sensitive to scary or violent elements in movies as he was at her age. It's also due, frankly, to the fact that we've wanted to see the new Star Wars movies with the whole extended family as they came out and we couldn't exactly leave her back at Grandma's house on her own :).

My kids aren't perfect, and I've made plenty of mistakes as a parent, some of which I may detail in later entries, but there's a lot of evidence stacking up that it really is possible to raise a good kid in this day and age without keeping said kid in a bubble.