Note: this is a super long post, and much of it is personal story and observation stuff. If you want to just skip to the bottom for the take-away lessons on combining Permaculture with parenting, please feel free.
For a while there my son and I were really butting heads. I’ve been at the end of my rope more than once in an insane battle of wills with a three-and-a-half year old, and I’ll admit that it’s gotten ugly and I’ve done and said a few things I’m not proud of.
“I hate you!”
“Hate me all you want – you still have to put your goddamned pants on!”
“Uh-oh. Time-out step for hitting. Three minutes. I’m starting the timer.”
…three minutes of screaming and general defiance pass…
“Hey, I’d be perfectly happy to lock you in your room all day. Now sit.”
And it’s not an excuse, but for about two months, Homebrew Husband was leaving for work at about 8 am and not getting home until 11 pm on Tuesday and Thursday. My long day is Wednesday, so between the two schedules, we didn’t really see each other between Monday evening and Friday evening. It was a long stretch of trying to balance an already pretty full life, and I don’t think anyone was thriving.
These heat of the moment parenting fails feel terrible, of course. I don’t want to yell at my kid, or lose my cool. I know, intellectually, how stupid it is to argue with a three year old. I love my son beyond words, but I was finding it a little hard to like him for a stretch there when every damned conversation was an argument about him wearing pants.
I had been attempting (and frequently failing) to follow a Love and Logic-esque parenting method with the little dude because those techniques worked beautifully with our daughter 7 years ago, when she was three.
But those methods never really got much traction with our son. When presented with a Love and Logic style choice, he was more likely to aggressively refuse either choice than to compliantly pick from the pre-approved options. Time-outs were not the gentle “regroup and come back when you are sweet” downtimes that they were with my daughter: they were full-blown war.
Every technique, phrase, and method I knew and had successfully used to raise up my daughter was totally, completely useless with my son. As stress and defiance and tension mounted, my attempt to get a handle on his behavior – to control his behavior, really – got tighter and tighter.
“Kids need routine. I need to schedule more. He’s acting like this because I’ve been too laid back with him. I need to start being way more disciplined about routine, and just keep things moving along all the time.”
“Routine” didn’t work very well. Oliver hated being told it was time to “move on” to the next scheduled activity, and I’m more a project-person than a routine person anyway. It wasn’t worth the fight – and it was a fight – to impose that kind of external control on both of us.
The Parent Teacher Conference
And so the resentment built, and my feelings of sucking as a mom became more and more constant. And from this emotional environment, I went to the parent teacher conference at my kid’s preschool.
His teachers said he was wonderful.
“We love him – he is the perfectly suited for this class,” they said. I was told my son was a great listener, charming, responsive, full of focus, good playing on his own or with other kids, age appropriate, etc. etc. It was the kind of report any parent of a young child would be thrilled to get from that child’s teacher.
“But, what about aggression and defiance?” I asked. “How do you handle that?”
The teachers looked at each other like I had just asked them how they respond when Oliver turns polka-dotted and starts glowing green.
“Uh, it’s not really an issue for us. We just give him the space and he does what he needs to do. He’s very good.”
Hmmm.
The Least Common Denominator Principle Of Life
I have this “self-reality check” concept I call The Least Common Denominator Principle of Life. Here’s what it says: look around and if there is some pattern of things consistently going wrong in your life and you are the only common element between those things, the issue is probably you.
This idea first occurred to me years ago, when I was simultaneously in some kind of pointless spat with my mom and several of my closest friends. Looking at the situation logically, I realized that while it was possible that three or four of the closest people in my life were all independently being unfair to me and persecuting me at the same time, but it was far, far more likely that I was being a jackass.
I was the Least Common Denominator in the situation. Ah-hah!
LCD is a wonderful revelation, because there are so many things in the world we have no control over, but if the problem is in our personal behavior, well, that’s something we can change.
We’ve all known people who make the same terrible decision over and over with slight variations and wonder why they keep getting the same terrible results. The Least Common Denominator Principle is like the bucket of cold water to the face that says: “Hold on, the issue here might be me. What is my role in this pattern in my life?”
The LCD suggests that if every person you meet is “a complete asshole” to you, maybe the problem is that you are an insufferable, antagonizing twat and you should stop that. If every boss you’ve ever had fires you for “totally unfair” reasons, maybe the issue is you need to become a better worker, or stop stealing from companies, or look at self-employment. Whatever.
I’m not suggesting that unfair, terrible, persecuting things don’t happen to people. They do. People go to jail for crimes they didn’t commit. Innocent hearts get broken. Injustice runs rampant, often following freeways of skintone or gender. Everyday, victims of terrible crimes try to put their lives back together after simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes, life is just totally, completely unfair. But that’s not what I’m talking about here.
I’m talking about patterns that don’t work in our life, and being honest about any role we have in helping to create those pattern. So as my son’s teachers raved about what a great kid he was, I felt that proverbial bucket of cold water dripping down my eyelashes and over my chin. “Does his behavior maybe come down to something I’m doing?”
He was great at preschool, great with the babysitter, great with grandma….Maybe the problem with my kid…was me. Or, at least, us, and our interactions.
Now I don’t want to overplay this. I’m not some terrible mom. I think by most standards I’m actually a very competent mom. And, come on, he’s three. Some of this is just normal developmental stuff filtered through his particularly high-energy, determined personality. But the LCD Principle clearly showed me that this issue wasn’t with my little boy. He’s doesn’t have Oppositional Defiance Disorder or something that makes him just generally difficult.
No, there was a problem in the system of my home and family life. Now, on the one hand, it sucks to think that maybe your kid has been a little asshole for a few months because you’ve got the system set up all wrong. But after a good day-long guilt-mope I realized that if I was helping to create a dysfunctional pattern, I could help solve that. I could come up with a better design and create a system more conducive to positive behavior. That was very hopeful.
Permaculture Parenting
At around this same time, I was listening to Geoff Laughton, a pretty famous Permaculture teacher, talk about Permaculture design principles. At it’s heart, Permaculture is really all about creating systems that work and create bounty in an upward spiral of positive interactions. You typically see this design philosophy applied to productive landscape design – gardening, farming, animal-keeping, etc.
But there is absolutely no reason why you can’t look at any system from a Permaculture standpoint. Businesses, hobbies, architecture, education curricula and more can all be designed with an eye towards Permaculture design principles. Even systems within the home.
Inside the system of our home, negative patterns had become established. Negative patterns of discipline and interaction fed negative results, which led to more negative discipline. And this fed into more negative results, like fracturing of trust and an undermined perception of kind authority. And so on.
One definition of Permaculture is, “thinking tools, that when used together, allow us to creatively re-design our environment and our behavior in a world of less energy and resources.”
As a mom, that was exactly what I wanted: to creatively re-design my home environment and behavior so that it required less emotional energy and resources. I wanted an emotional bounty of joy and laughter, not an exhaustive series of disciplinary inputs that never set the system to right. I wanted to Permaculture my parenting.
Montessori vs. Permaculture
I looked to the system in which my kid seemed to be already thriving, his Montessori preschool. His teachers and I joked that Oliver is like a Border Collie – smart as a whip, very high energy, and very determined and focused if he has a job to do. This is absolutely, 100% true: when Oliver was a few minutes old and the nurses were giving him the APGAR test on the miniature exam bassinet, he did a full, board-straight plank push-up.
He’s been a kid who wants to do it all himself since before he could babble or toddle. And like a border collie, if he doesn’t have a job, if he doesn’t get the stimulation he needs, he languishes and can become quite difficult and destructive.
As I started to research Montessori, I was struck over and over again by similarities between that method and Permaculture. Maria Montessori, the lady who founded Montessori, developed her ideas about early childhood education by long, quiet observation of children. Bill Mollison, typically credited as the founder of Permaculture, emphasizes at length the importance of observing the system of nature. Both philosophies speak to larger social and/or ecological healing through good design.
Montessori believed that setting up the proper environment for a child would allow him or her to fulfill an inborn drive to learn constructively and eventually grow into a functional, normalized adult. Permaculture teaches that proper design of the productive environment is the key to sustainable, healthy, long-term production.
Montessori |
Permaculture |
| “All our efforts will come to nothing until we remedy the great injustice done the child, and remedy it by cooperating with him. If we are among the men of good will who yearn for peace, we must lay the foundation for peace ourselves, by working for the social world of the child.” -Maria Montessori |
“Sitting at our back doorsteps, all we need to live a good life lies about us. Sun, wind, people, buildings, stones, sea, birds and plants surround us. Cooperation with all these things brings harmony, opposition to them brings disaster and chaos.” -Bill Mollison |
| “To assist a child we must provide him with an environment which will enable him to develop freely…The prize and punishments are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them.” -Maria Montessori |
“Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted & thoughtless action; of looking at systems in all their functions rather than asking only one yield of them & of allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions.” -Bill Mollison |
| “Plainly, the environment must be a living one, directed by a higher intelligence, arranged by an adult who is prepared for his mission.” -Maria Montessori |
“Permaculture is the art and science of consciously designing human systems to increase quality of life and enhance and regenerate ecosystems – by following the patterns of nature, we can all experience abundance.” – Dr. David Suzuki |
| “It is in the encounter of the maternal guiding instincts with the sensitive periods of the newly born that conscious love develops between parent and child.” -Maria Montessori |
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We only love what we understand. We only understand what we are taught.” -Babia Dioum |
| “The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.” -Maria Montessori |
“Good design depends on a free and harmonious relationship between nature and people, in which careful observation and thoughtful interaction provide the design inspiration.” – David Holmgren |
| “We ourselves have lost this deep and vital sensitiveness, and in the presence of children in whom we see it reviving, we feel as if we were watching a mystery being unfolded. It shows itself in the delicate act of free choice, which a teacher untrained in observation can trample on before she even discerns it, much as an elephant tramples the budding flower about to blossom in its path.” -Maria Montessori |
“It is a challenge to artists to study and portray knowledge in a compact, memorable, and transmissible form, to research and recreate for common use those surviving art forms which still retain their meaning, and to re-integrate such art with science and with society and its functions and needs. It is a challenge to educators to revive the meaningful geometries, songs, and dances that gave us, and our work, meaning.” – Bill Mollison |
| “The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” -Maria Montessori |
“For the final act of the designer, once components have been assembled, is to make a sensible pattern assembly of the whole. Appropriate patterning in the design process can assist the achievement of a sustainable yield.” – Bill Mollison |
The more I studied Montessori the more it felt like the right playbook for redesigning the interactions in my own home that weren’t working optimally.
Implementing Permaculture Parenting Changes
Permaculture says that you study the interactions between elements because that’s where the magic happens. Well, my interactions with my son were typically rushed. Oliver didn’t have generous, self-directed transition time.
I was nagged by this feeling that I had a lot to do and it was never quite done. (Least Common Denominator principle: I give this feeling to myself because I try to cram too many things into my life.) I would attempt to work while parenting him. Result: he got a distracted mom and I piddled away ineffectually at my writing, frequently interrupted and ever more burdened by this stress that I was falling behind.
To fix this, I had to redesign my mornings and start getting up about 2-and-a-half hours earlier than I was before. I am a night owl, but my brain works better in the first half of the day. By pushing my wake-up time from 7:30 to 5:00, I am able to whip through a bunch of home and business management tasks in the wee hours, in peace with a cup of coffee, and still get in a 60-90 minute focused burst of writing.
Now, for me, this kinda sucks. I am not, by laws of nature, God or man, designed to wake up at 5:00 in the morning. I could happily sleep ten hours a night, from midnight until ten, or two AM to noon. But the whole home system works better when I suck it up and start my day early, and the results are so much better that I’m willing to keep it going.
My morning time, in combination with the couple hours while Oliver is at preschool gives me enough time to feel like I can “put work away” when he’s home and really be with him. We spend a lot more of what they call “quality time” together. Increasingly nice weather has helped a ton, too – the more we can be outside, the better for both of us.
I’m leaning on my community, too. My mom watches my son occasionally on Fridays, which gives me a nice chunk of time for work projects or gardening, and gives Oliver the advantage of seeing his grandma. We hired our awesome neighbor to babysit both kids one evening a week, so that my husband and I can have some adult time. Having a few hours each week we can count on to reconnect is incredibly valuable.
In keeping with the Border Collie revelation, we gave Oliver more chores. We call them jobs, and he does his jobs at the same time other family members are doing their jobs. The kid is plenty capable. He feeds the cats in the morning, sets the table in the late afternoon and participates in Toy Tidy in the evening before bed.
He loves his jobs, and putting Oliver in change of setting the dinner table has also helped re-establish the routine of sitting at the table for dinner as a family. That’s something I’d let slide a lot over the past few years. Sometimes we have game dinner and play cards as a family. It’s very fun! That’s synergy – patterns of home that add up to more than the sum of their parts.
Montessori teaches that it’s good for kids to be deeply focused on an activity, so now when Oliver is engaged in some self-directed project, I let him run with it as long as possible. I’ll often put out Montessory type “activity trays” for him to discover around the house.
By changing some of these basics, I feel like it’s so much easier to engage with my son constructively, and to have fun as a parent. He’s still a handful, and he’s still three, but the systems in the home are working to support positive interactions instead of detrimental ones.
It’s really not as hard as it seems, tweaking the systems for how you parent. If you see immediate results: a fun, cooperative little guy instead of a thrashing, kicking, mini-tyrant, that’s a lot of motivation to keep it going. Even getting up at the ass-crack of dawn has become normal-ish.
Permaculture Parenting Take-Aways
These are some lessons I’ve applied as I’ve attempted to Permaculture my parenting. They are directly based on the Twelve Principles of Permaculture. I’ve just tried to interpret those principles from a family systems standpoint.
Observe and Interact – What is really driving your kid’s behavior, positive or negative? What does the situation look like to them? How do your interactions with your child help or hinder calm and positive behavior? What is driving your behavior?
Catch and Store Energy – Work with the natural energy levels of your child. Assign real, functional, age-appropriate work. Children can direct their efforts towards home-system-positive behaviors. Allow time for deep focus – catch the wonder of youth and store it for lifelong learning.
Obtain a Yield – Chores, exploration, time, awe – the yield of a well-tended childhood is the dividend of a functional adult. The family system has to work for everyone – ensure time and resources are allocated so that all family members feel useful reward for their role in the family. Breaks are important, fair distribution of labor is important.
Apply Self Regulation and Accept Feedback – Check yourself with the least Common Denominator Principle – what is your role in creating a less-than-functional system? Be honest and be willing to change your own behavior as necessary. Discourage anti-social behavior in the family, but do not use anti-social behavior to do so. Encourage self-regulation in your kids. A “strong-will” first controls itself.
Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services – The most valuable resources in a family grow as they are used. Love, respect, discipline, care, fun, joy, gratitude – these things increase through frequent use. Emphasizing these values instead of consumables – toys, video games, etc. – leads to a more functional family system.
Produce No Waste – Yelling and screaming is waste. Disrespect is waste. Aggression in the family is waste. When the system is fractured, we waste opportunities for positive interaction and learning. We waste productive time and we waste opportunities to catch and store a yield of trust, care and kindness. What opportunities are available to our family that we are squandering? How can we work together to avoid this kind of waste?
Design From Patterns to Details – What are the big picture patterns in your family? What routines of behavior lead to struggle and chaos; what routines lead to family calm? Get the essential patterns worked out and minor complaints may sort themselves out naturally.
Integrate Rather Than Segregate – Communicate that everyone in the family has jobs. We are all important and we value each other’s important roles. Let children see parents working. Set children up for success by arranging home systems so that they can really use them. Make sure children’s size and skills are accommodated with scaled down tools, step-stools, etc. Take the time to teach valuable skills.
Use Small and Slow Solutions – Implement small changes as you nudge your routines toward more functional homelife. If something doesn’t work, observe and try again. Iterate, iterate, iterate.
Use and Value Diversity – Every person in the family is unique. There is a thin line between our best personality traits and our worst, and the difference is often how they are channeled. The frustratingly stubborn child might be the most determined when her interest is sparked. The hopeless day-dreamer might one day bring his amazing inner-fantasy world to the page. Allow your kids to be who they are, within a framework of respect. The most frustrating thing about a child may be the thing that defines their success as an adult.
Use Edges and Value the Marginal – When family members interact it is an opportunity for growth, yield and synergy. Try not to squander these opportunities. I.e., “quality time” is good, but critical moments of quality time can be discovered during those marginal moments in the day, not just structured as stand alone events. “Door open, mouth shut” is a good mantra – be available and non-judging in your interactions.
Creatively Use and Respond to Change – Families change. Children change. Sometimes this change makes things easier, sometimes it adds challenges. During times of upheaval, return to a stage of more acute observation. Check in. Do not assume children need rescuing from every little trouble but be willing to step in to rebalance or nudge the system as necessary.
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Wow! Permaculture parenting tied right into potty training for me! Less energy and resources. Because as I keep telling my husband, yelling, screaming, crying about a 2-year-old peeing on the floor just isn’t going to work!! She’s got to feel independent, and we have to let her do it itself, mistakes and all. Calm is key!
And I love it when kids see their parents working, it’s so vitally important that the kiddos (as cute as they may be) can learn to occupy themselves. Watch. Then imitate mom and dad.
I love love love the parallels you have put together. I sure could have used these insights when my 15 year old was 3!!!.
I look forward to sharing this with my boys today, we have been exploring permaculture as a family, and have been having great conversations together about our family system. Thank you for sharing this application. At 11, 15, 43 & 47 our little family is still learning how to create rhythm as our needs grow and change- trying to find ways to support desired actions by trellising rather than trying to use grumpy complaining as a change tool.
Thank you too for getting up at 5:00 to write- you are definitely sending out nutrients for a saner more connected world.
I read your blog with great interest. As a Grandmother, I’ve been there, done that and have not only the T-shirts, but the occasional battle scar to go with it. Very sensible outlook on child rearing. Parenting can be a very scary business, since there are few directions and everyone is different. Sound like you have it pretty much figured out. I have a sneaking suspicion your children will be a pleasure to be around and be far more reachable as teenagers. That is an area you need to get all the help you can get, so you need to lay the “ground work” early on.
Words of wisdom! I’ve tagged this to come back to as a resource, thank you!
As a aspiring future mom… me too 🙂
Thank you for this thoughtful post. I think these guidelines could apply to any interactions – perhaps in the workplace with those one manages to caring for elderly parents!
Indeed! I don’t even have kids and I eagerly read every word of this thoughtful post. I do have aging parents who are changing rapidly and a wonderful team at work where we are experiencing growing pains. I will try to apply these principles in those contexts.
Awesome post, Erica. A lot of good “food for thought”. I think much of this applies not only in parenting, but in relationships generally.
Love it Erica. Good read with my coffee this morning and I have the feeling I’ll be re-reading a few more times this week to simmer some of the ideas and parallels. Its hard to admit when we’re the one failing the system, either at work or at home…this post has a lot of great points for trying to turn it around. On the bright side…the ass-crack of dawn is coming a little earlier these days…makes it a bit easier to tolerate the 5am alarm.
Fabulous post! I’m so glad you’re both learning to channel his ‘border collie’ energy! That’s a powerful resource that will serve him well.
An aside – What is it about boys not wanting to put on their pants? We worked a partial compromise. Got the boy colorful roomy boxers (‘square pants’) that look like shorts. He’s allowed to lounge around the house in them and a t-shirt first thing in the morning when it’s just us, just so he sits in a fashion that ‘guards his privacy’, as we put it. But, there are boundaries – pants are required for sitting at the breakfast table (when there’s bacon in the offer, this is a quick conversation) and he’s not to take the trash out to the outside can in his boxers (don’t think he hasn’t tried!)
What a lovely, thoughtful post. What I like best is that it reminds me to look at our family life as an organic whole, that has different parts, and fluxes and changes, but at core is organic.
Hey, I liked your post. Definitely good for thought. Don’t we moms go a little overboard these days? We used to be housewives, now we are stay at home moms. This subtle semantic difference says a lot. It’s a good reminder to just step back and observe.
My 4 year old son is one of those boys. Extremely agile, strong, great fine and gross moter skills, and emotional beyond words. I am not as organized as you, frankly I am not happy being extremely organized, but I am very strict about routines, a lot of sleep, and less stimulation in the form of tv, dvds, and ipads. (We have no tv, very little other screen time, maybe an hour a week and many weeks with no screens). I don’t have activity trays or come up with things for him to do, but I do give him a lot of chances to provide for the family.
I live in Germany, in the birthplace of Waldorf and Rudolph Steiner ideas and over time we have learned a lot from those ideas. We give our boy a lot of dangerous things to do, he can light the campfire we often have, cook over the fire, climb on the roof of the garden shed, climb high trees, use a drill, real tools, axes (with supervision of course!) and I have found he is much more settled and controlled. He regulates himself better. We’ve never needed to go to the emergency room because of an accident. If he won’t wear pants, than he goes out without pants (though I do take some with) and the temperature and/or wierd looks he gets have shamed him into adhering to societal norms quickly. 🙂 I found just letting him make his mistakes, and making him aware of danger and needing to concentrate has made life better for him. Don’t know how that fits into permaculture parenting, but it’s just my experience.
I truly believe some boys were just meant to be living on a farm and suburban lifestyles lead to a lot of conflict with their basic nature, within themselves and usually with mom, so I do what I can to give him an environment more suited to his needs. However what he does with that environment is his own thing, not mine.
What I mean going on about real work and danger is that it gives a child another perspective on limitations vs. those endless pants/bathroom/whatever discussions. 🙂
I freaking love this. 7 years is also the age difference between my oldest and middle child. She’s 3 now and holy cannoli…she is a force unto herself. Always has been. I also have a story much like your story about your son doing a full on plank just after birth…
She will be 3 on Friday and I also have a 6 and a half month old. The last few weeks interactions have become very unpleasant around here. She has even been fighting with her 10 year old brother, who used to be adoring and doting and now essentially hides from her when he gets home from school and has repeatedly asked me when she is going to grow out or being such a butthead. Of course, they are 2 totally different temperaments, so parenting the 2 of them is completely different. I find myself yelling and furious before noon most days…time to observe and plan. Really amazingly relatable post. Thanks for this.
One star. Writer doesn’t even discuss burying child under cardboard and kitchen refuse and growing a new one.
In all seriousness, kids are very capable of way more than we, culturally, consider putting on them. Little dude wants to be productive, just like mom and dad. Trust that they can, teach them to do, and they will.
I’m curious how your daughter has responded to the changes. My oldest is great with our current “system,” if you could call it that, so I hate to jigger things too much. However, I’m getting tired of the “stage” my youngest has been in (and coming out of the denial)– I’m starting to admit its actually temperament. I’ll see what I can lift from these ideas see if we can’t get a better balance.
My oldest appreciates a calm environment, so anything I can do to provide that, including the cooling the fire of my little one, is good for her. The stress of discord really hits her hard, and because she is so placid, her needs tend to get shoved to the back when he is acting out.
Thanks for taking the time (at 5:00 am – “the ass-crack of dawn” – no less!) to write these words of wisdom. My kids are 16 and 12 and I still need to apply the LCD principal to myself (and therefore, hopefully, teach it to my children by living it) when my parenting seems to be much more of an “uphill battle” than is necessary.
Your Principles of Permaculture Parenting will be printed off and put on my fridge for reference (please consider doing a poster/set of 12 coffee mugs for us to purchase!).
And in thanks, I’ll share one tip that worked wonders for me when going through the “no pants” phase with my son (as well as many other similar standoffs) – I would not say, “Would you please put on your pants?” (answer: “NO!”), nor would I say, “Are you going to put on your pants, or not?” (answer: “NOT!”), but would instead ask him “Do you want to wear your blue pants today, or the green ones?” I was still making the big choices (ie. you ARE going to be wearing pants today), but they got to make the smaller choices – and they were suddenly more cooperative.
I found that giving my kids the small (and limited) choices in their day (“Do you want baked beans or macaroni & cheese for lunch?” instead of “What would you like to eat for lunch?”) it gave them a sense of control, lowered the stress levels of all involved and prevented the confrontations. I recommend it to all who are having the “toddler standoffs”.
And I’m definitely with you that kids are way more capable than we (adults) think. As soon as my son showed interest in cleaning tasks, I took out one section of the Swiffer handle to make it size-appropriate for him and let him help! And now that he’s 16 (and getting ready to launch in the next few years), we joke that he’ll probably be the only one in his university dorm/shared rental that will be able to do his own laundry, cook more than microwave popcorn and Kraft Dinner, vacuum and mop the floors! I’m all for child labour! 🙂
Great post. LCD has eliminated (most of) my road rage; and who wants to show that kind of example to your kids? When I’m “on” my 2.5yr old twin boys are incredibly positive and creative. When I can redirect their energy into jobs that feel like games, amazing stuff happens! When I’m “off” I’ve started looking for ways for the three of us to lay fallow for a little while and regain our energy.
We don’t cover with cardboard, but putting them in the “wolf den” of couch cushions and blankets is great cozy quiet time without banishing them to their room.
Great way to illustrate that permaculture is a design system for more than growing food–grows relationships, also.
I started reading your blog a few months ago and love it! thank you for all your insight. This post deserves (and will get from me) lots of thoughtful rereading at a time when my kids are asleep, but I am so thrilled to find someone else grappling with these ideas and trying to find a way of applying permaculture principles to parenting. They definitely seem to mesh well with a lot of attachment principles. Not sure if you listen to the Permaculture Podcast, but the presenter Scott, a stay-at-home-dad and permaculturist, recently did a short podcast on a similar topic http://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/2014/short0404/ and has a few other pieces out or coming out about kids and permaculture, and women and permaculture (very related, methinks). I hope to one day write a proper proper comment of appreciation for all you’re doing, in the mean time, a big gracias from your dedicated follower in Argentina.
I like it. Jack Spirko also talks about incorporating permaculture with almost any system. Thanks for spreading the good word of permaculture.
His PermaEthos spearheading will hopefully be a perfect example of success. I’m excited to see where it goes.
Awesome! I’ll be pondering this for a while.
It is great to read how you figured this thing out. I had a difficult son and know it isn’t easy. I read a book by Wayne Dyer titled ‘What do you really want for your children?’ And to be fair, if there is a problem, it is usually because of the parent. Guilty! Not enough parents act like parents and we tend not to give our children choices or let them learn the consequences of making bad decisions. Nobody is perfect and we all learn in our own way. We also have to let go a bit of control. Like not wearing pants, for example. He will soon put them on when you don’t make an issue of it or if he gets a choice of which pair to wear. Like wearing a coat when it is cold. My son is 24 now and is so laid back and incredible, I can barely remember the challenging times. All the best to you.
Thank you so very much for this wake-up call! I was only a minute or two of reading time into this post, when I realized with astonishment how much your wise observations also apply, amazingly, to my own situation — and so I read every single word, including all the previous comments.
I am a 71-year-old divorced grandmother, who is also the sole care-giver for my Alzheimer’s-afflicted 74-year-old former spouse. Divorced or not, we live only a few blocks apart, and we’ve still always been best friends; I know he would do the same for me if our positions were reversed.
Despite the fact that his chronological age is 74, of course his progressive illness often makes him behave just as willfully, stubbornly, and irrationally as your 3-year-old did. To say this is maddeningly frustrating for BOTH of us doesn’t even begin to touch the mark on this topic, as it has resulted in months of screaming arguments and indescribably pointless blame-games. In our calmer, saner moments, we have each made efforts to govern our hurtful speech and angry accusations, but truthfully, those moments are becoming less and less frequent as this horrible illness takes its relentlessly gruesome toll — on both of us.
I’ve read a lot of helpful, compassionate articles about “taking care of the caretaker” — perhaps too many such articles, I now believe. Until I read your post today, I hadn’t actually realized that while on one level that is certainly good advice (you can’t take care of someone else if you’re losing your own health as a result), I now know I ALSO need to take responsibility for, and substantially reduce, my own unrealistic expectations of what he “should” be able to do or be or say now.
His illness-caused behavioral regression actually DOES mean that I am now the “parent” of a 3-year-old — and my EXPECTATIONS that he “should” be more mature or responsible than he can, in reality, be any longer, is what is actually causing all our grief these days.
Thank you so very much for your insight, and for sharing with all of us the connections you’ve made between these two behavioral systems. Who’d have ever thought your thoughtful conclusions could be applicable to so many other situations than the one you described? But they are, and once again, I thank you from the bottom of my heart, for sharing these ideas with all of us!
I watched my mother for several years act as the primary caregiver for my grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s. She described that same regression – she said it was like caring for a child, but backward, with skills regression that progressed until eventually my grandma had the self-care capacity of an infant. You have my deepest sympathy for your situation, and admiration for the work you are doing to care for your ex-husband. May the road in front of you be clear, even if it’s hard to walk.
I really enjoyed thinking about parenting this way, Erica. I love how you can apply gardening principles to just about anything. I went through a similar crisis with my youngest when he was three (and am actually writing about it now) and was amazed at how quickly things improved when my husband & I finally got our shit together. I think we are all enormously relieved. (These second born children make us eat humble pie!)
I am glad that you have found something that works. I raised three kids, or as my philosophy always was, I trained 3 adults. Teachers (many of them, anyway) hated conferences when their only complaint was that my kids questioned authority, but isn’t that what every functional adult should be able to do? They all learned to stand up for themselves and others, to make a coherent pitch for what they wanted, to argue their point respectfully without being rude or bullying.
I had the hardest time with my daughter (middle child). Part of it was her medical challenges when she was little, when I had to pull rank too often in order to give her medicine. It was non-negotiable, life-threatening stuff, and I didn’t have the skills at that point to do more than force the issue. We both learned, and when she out-grew most of the issues our relationship improved greatly. But I still knew that she saved her “inner bitch” for me, because I was safe. She knew that there was literally nothing she could do that would make me hate her (even if I didn’t like her much at the moment). Everyone else always told me how sweet she was, and when she passed (car accident 6 years ago tomorrow), I got some truly beautiful notes from people telling me how much she had brought to their lives. I don’t know that a parent can ask for anything more from life, and I am very grateful that her friends credit her with insisting that friendships are worth maintaining and they have included me in their lives in her place. She is who I would like to be when I grow up.
Excellent. I’m the geek that tends to try and blur lines in everything, because it brings me to a deeper understanding of whatever it is I’m studying.
Ask my Wife how I went on a rant once for about an hour on how digging some (metaphorical) swales could fix our nanny state government telling us what we can and can’t eat, amongst other unnecessary regulations. 🙂
Well as a permie you know that intervention tends to lead to more intervention. We might not have to regulate what people can eat if we didn’t subsidize certain crops and industrial food producers with our tax dollars, thereby putting the thumb of government on the side of high fructose corn syrup production and making high-calorie but nutrient-void foods artificially inexpensive….but wait, this article was about parenting. I digress. 😉
My daughter (almost 5) and the second born sounds very much like your son. First born (boy) was so easy. I’m going to have to think about the LCD and also figure out how to utilize permaculture techniques.
Wow, what an intelligent and thought-provoking post! I just discovered your blog recently, through some comments on the MMM site, and I’m really enjoying your writing and lifestyle topics. Looking forward to more!
Your wisdom and ability to share it keeps growing. You are an amazing person to be sharing time/space with. I was also touched by the elderly spouse caring for ex. I am the same age, husband not Alzheimer’s, thank goodness, but aging. At some point in life a 7 year age difference starts to play a role. Compassion is needed as old expectations become unrealistic.
I don’t even have children, so you’d think this would not be the article for me, but I loved every word. Thank you.
I dont even have kids but I’m filling this away for a time in the relatively near future when My partner and I take that step.
Thank you for taking the time to share these insights and kudos for having the ability to present them in an easy to grasp non-preachy sort of way.
Your children are very lucky.
Oh. My. God. Here I am, killing a little bit of time in your archives and I come across something so perfectly relevant to my life that it seems like it was written just for me.
My sweet, sweet four-year old has recently become a little tyrant…but only with me. Everyone else gushes about how cooperative and polite he is. With me, he puts up a fight at every turn. And somehow, until I read this post, it didn’t occur to me that perhaps something I was doing could be the problem.
Time to think a bit about the systems at work in my home and what might need tweaking.
Many, many thanks for this thoughtful post!
Wow! Well done my friend! It can be very difficult to apply permaculture principles to other aspects of life (other than food landscape design), and you totally hit the nail on the head. Thank you for for such a wonderful post. I will keep this in a safe place for sure.
How in the world did you write about my personal life so accurately??? I also have a 3 1/2 year old, who did not follow the easy-going pattern of her older sister (also 7 years older). And I have found these same principles to be so effective. When our youngest has the most issues in a day, I often realize it’s because I’m too distracted to give her the attention she craves. And often a short but intense one-on-one activity will send her off to play independently for a while longer. Your description of your son could fit her to a T!
omguawd, you wrote this just for me right?! to have parenting skills broken down into a way of gardening is just what I needed for a how to change how I parent lesson. Thanks a bushel for this guiding light I will look to in the days and seasons ahead.