Many parents seem to be in a perpetual rush, which stresses both them and their children. It's time to change the way we think about time, writes Kathryn Holmquist..............................................................'While parents areon parent-time, children are on child-time'..............................................................
Parents may have money, a home and healthy children, yet still be time poor. Many of us feel that rather than controlling our lives, we're letting our lifestyles control us.
"Too many parents feel they spend their lives rushing around attempting to meet the conflicting needs of employers, schools, childcare providers, bank managers, landlords \ negotiating traffic etc, so that they have little time to spend with their children," writes Owen Keenan, chief executive of Barnardos, in the charity's report, Parents Under Pressure.
"The resultant time poverty has become one of the greatest threats to children's well-being and a major stress factor for parents. Families who are particularly vulnerable are affected by these stresses also, but here it can have the effect of seriously undermining them and contributing to their breakdown."
We are living lopsided lives because our culture values paid work more highly than family work. "Never before have we had so much money and so much technical assistance and so little time," says Yvonne Jacobson, psychologist with the Marriage and Relationships Counselling Service. She believes parents like herself, with children, a spouse and a busy full-time career, need to change the way they think about time.
"Parenting means bringing in values and ways from your own experience of childhood. You are either perpetuating the way you were brought up, or changing it. Because we are living in a time that's very different than our own parents' time, it's impossible for us to do the same as our parents.
"My own mother's job was to look after the house and the garden and while I would like to do the same, I have to pay someone else to do it and give up having nice meals every day of the week. The more you want to keep things the same as they were in your childhood, the more you put yourself under stress. We have to ask ourselves, what do I really want to keep for my own children about my childhood, and what do I have to let go?" she believes.
"A colleague in the MRCS suggests that parents see themselves as having eight pints of energy. How are you going to drink it? If you're using seven pints at work and one for the family, can you adjust that to five pints at work and three pints for the family?" Feeling in control of time is the key to managing parenting stresses.
"We can blame work, kids or an awful lot of things, but there is no reason you can't take back control," she advises.
Parents also need to model good time management for their children. Much family stress comes from forcing small children to cope with something they are not equipped to handle: a time-pressured lifestyle. Yet children need their lives to be calm and unhurried.
Parents who are anxious and rushed have difficulty seeing the world from their children's point of view, believes Helen Sholdice, a parent coach in Dublin. Children under the age of six have no sense of time and don't understand urgency. They are upset by having to rush from one thing to the next. Children need to be eased through the transition from one activity to the next.
"Parents need to be able to help the child anticipate what's coming next, to help the child to prepare for the transition," says Sholdice.
When parents rush, they scoop their children up and race with them to the car, leaving the child with no way to end one activity and prepare for the next. Young children cry and kick, refuse to be buckled into their car seats, then roar all the way to the destination.
"Parents under stress need to see that while parents are on parent-time, children are on child-time. The parent has an agenda and a plan for the day, but the child is unaware that there's a plan. The child has to be eased into a new situation. The parent has to break the transition down into stages for the child. The parent needs to say, 'in 10 minutes we will be going to the car, so we need to think about putting away our toys and getting our coats'. Then, when the coats are on, 'now we're getting ready to go to the car'. If there is no leeway for extra time, the parent has to be both firm and kind," says Sholdice.
"Parents talk about how unco-operative children can be, and say that their children are never ready. They tell me about picking up a crying child, strapping the child into a car seat and the resistant child actually head-butting the parent. The child has lashed out because it is hard for the parent to pull back and assess the situation from the child's perspective. All of a sudden the parent sees the child as no more than an impediment in the way. The child is sobbing in the back of the car and feeling abandoned, not knowing what they did wrong."
Parents need to ask themselves, what is the rush for? They need to find ways to get the extra half-an hour that could make all the difference. Sholdice suggests that asking employers for even the slightest flexibility - such as starting work at 9.30 a.m. instead of 9 a.m. - could ensure peace in the family.
Children's learning development relies on them being able to understand how one thing leads to another. Rush them through the process, and they may not learn it. Or, they may turn out to be just like their parents - always running and never feeling safe and secure.
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