Helping Parents Be the Best They Can Be

In Letting Go of Our Adult Children: When What We Do Is Never Enough, Arlene Harder writes:

"Everyone who chooses to raise a child is automatically enrolled in The Parenting Game. The goal is to maneuver, with love and minimum error, a small but growing object through a series of increasingly complex mazes that end after eighteen years have passed. The skills required? Simple. You only need patience, strength, wisdom, sacrifice, courage, perseverance, flexibility, nurturance, love, loyalty, and a good dose of humor."

". . . as the game progresses both parents must constantly be prepared for revised rules that may contradict earlier ones. No one can ever be fully prepared for The Parenting Game."

"How does it feel to play that challenging contest? Suzanne Gordon expresses a typical response when she talks of being a parent, 'the identity that can never be shed.' In a recent commentary in the Los Angeles Times she wrote:"

"I know from personal experience that the intense work of parenting does not end after a few exhausting months of round- the-clock feeding and diapering . . . I know it involves far more than teaching children to 'go potty,' feed themselves, read, write, and think, respect other human beings, control hostility and anger, overcome sadness and disappointment, forge close relationships with others, and maybe someday find a mate and have children of their own. . . It involves the extraordinary capacity to cope with one's own frustration - and sometimes even one's own rage - to balance one's own needs with the often unpredictable needs of another, to tolerate terrible anxiety and even dread about their safety and well-being, to give and give and give when there is no 'please' and 'thank you,' and finally, in such a bittersweet finale, to let go."

True, the parenting game is as difficult, or more so, today than it was in 1994 when the book (read the entire book online) was first published. But raising strong, emotionally secure, thoughtful, educated, and caring children has never been an easy task even though the very survival of our society depends upon our willingness to try. And while we don't plan to cover every area of parenting on Learning Place Online (LPO), we hope to provide a number of ideas that will make that task a bit easier for parents, as well as the rest of us, who want to make certain all children are given the chance to dream—and achieve—great dreams.