Since every drop of water represents a chunk of your time and hard work, you try to ration it carefully. But somehow, once that bucket is up the hill, the water seems to disappear. A big portion is used for drinking water —for survival—for you and your family. You have to also use it for keeping a minimum standard of sanitation. After that, the demands for the water seem to be endless. Your teenager loves to take hot baths. Your neighbor is always over for a cup or two. The baby likes to splash in a big bowl, and the diaper washing never ends. It feels like you’re always running up and down that hill, but there’s never enough. You have an acorn, but you haven’t planted it yet: you don’t know much about oaks and you’ve heard that trees take a lot of water.

Now, imagine that your bucket has holes: Thousands of pinprick holes that allow the water to seep out without your even noticing. Imagine that almost half of your hard-earned water disappears before you’ve even had a chance to decide what to do with it. The path up the hill is green with weeds that only get in your way, and your oak tree, the one that could have supplied shade for you and your children, never got planted.

The bucket is your money: hard to earn, easy to spend, easier still to waste. Frugality is nothing more than refusing to let your money fall in the dirt, leaving you nothing but worthless clutter to show for it. In a culture where billions of dollars in advertising is spent on convincing you to spend, spend, spend, being a Tightwad means bucking the system. Some even consider it subversive. I think it’s just common sense that our country, our state, our cities, our communities and our families would be better off if everyone would re-use and recycle, part with their money only for things of real value, spend less than what they earn, and use the rest to save for the future. That oak tree is the more important than anything else beyond basic survival. Plant it. Water it. Watch it grow.

You’re getting pretty big these days, tap-dancing away inside of me. Does this mean you’re really going to be here in a couple of months? I’m not sure I’m ready for parenthood. I’ll admit that the prospect of discovering that whole new part of me scares me a little.

I’m supposed to know all about being a good parent. I’ve been working with families as a counselor for years. I’ve taught parenting classes and I host a TV show where experts talk about child rearing. But, the more I learn, the more I don’t know. It’s a complicated, wonderful mystery how children grow.

Some parents seem to do a better job than others. Maybe they just had good kids. (You see, baby, I have lots of excuses already.) I’m an expert in helping people to change, not an expert parent. I guess I’m writing this letter to get my thoughts together about what I do know and to make some promises to you about what I’m going to try to do.

I want you to be mentally healthy. I want you to think very highly of yourself, to be responsible, flexible and successful in the goals you set for yourself. I want you to be able to love someone deeply and to be able to hold your own in social situations. If you turn out that way, I’m going to feel I was a good parent (whether I had anything to do with it or not).

I’ve done a lot of reading, taken classes, and I think I know all of the techniques (how to set rules, how to be consistent, what to do when you cry). It’s reassuring, but not the whole answer, I know. The more families I see, the more I begin to think that those day-to-day parenting decisions are not the essential ingredient of good parenting. Children seem to learn more from who their parents are than from what their parents teach them. That’s a scary thought! Will you have all my weaknesses? Am I going to have to very carefully live up to my values in order to set a good example for you? No wonder every parent I’ve ever met feels guilty!

Okay, let’s look at it another way. There’s a good chance you’ll pick up my strengths along the way. My mother embarrassed me to tears when I was a teenager (I guess I’ll have to get ready for that), but I think I have her ability to feel deeply, to be able to give and receive. I learned her values about money (pinch those pennies ‘til they bleed!), the feminism she embraced in the Seventies. She also taught, through example, the importance of taking care of those less fortunate than oneself, in one’s extended family and in the community. She wasn’t a perfect mom, but she was a good one. I hope I’ll be able to follow her example.

I’m glad I won’t be alone in this job. Whenever I begin to feel too guilty, I can always blame your dad, heredity (from his side!), our declining culture, punk rock, etc. Seriously, I promise I’ll work hard to keep our relationship a good one. I want you to learn how people can love one another and live together, how they can argue and come out whole, and how they can survive the responsibility of commitment.

I’m going to do my best, Baby. Some days I will make mistakes. And, you’ll have your own unique set of neuroses to struggle with. But I’m going to love you and be the best person I can be. It’s the only thing I can do. Good parenting is being able to live with not having all the answers.

Love, Mom

Author’s note: My First boy was born a few weeks after I wrote this essay. He’s now 17, six feet tall and captain of the varsity football team. I’m more proud of him than I can tell you - and proud of myself, too. So far, so good.

I have three sons. My eldest provides me with the biggest challenges, probably because each time he goes through developmental stage it’s a brand new one for me. When he was small, he was extremely aggressive. I don’t know where he got it from — maybe it has something to do with that ‘Y’ chromosome. He started biting while he was nursing at about four months old. By the time he’d reached 10 months, I’d finally figured out how to stop the behavior by putting him down and leaving the room whenever he bit, and I thought the problem was solved. This lasted about a year. Then he started to bite his little friend — and hit her, and pull her hair, and kick her, and grab the toys.

What had I done to deserve this? I became increasingly frustrated and angry. When it first started happening, I would say, “No, no, honey, no biting.” This didn’t work, so I did it a little louder. “NO! DON’T YOU EVER BITE HER!” The biting continued, so I brought out the serious punishments. I tried everything. I yelled. I took things away. I grabbed him and took him to another room. I held the door for endless time-outs with my two-year-old kicking and screaming hysterically. Nothing worked. In fact, his aggressive behavior got worse. In one afternoon with his little friend, I counted 23 bites, kicks and scratches.

I talked with everyone I knew, to blow off steam and try to find some answers. People told me that boys were all aggressive and that this was just a stage. Others suggested a variety of crueler punishments, but I refused to slap my baby, or to bite him back. (My father said, “But, it worked with you, sweetie!”)

Finally, my friend Laura gave me the best advice of all. “Well,” she said, “If one of your clients came to you with this problem, what would you tell them?”

That turned the whole thing around for me. I got some distance from the problem and suddenly saw exactly what I had been doing wrong. I’d been trying to put that proverbial old square peg into the round hole. When the peg didn’t fit, I tried pushing it in, and when that didn’t work, I got out the sledge hammer.

The system of punishments and rewards as a way to control children’s behavior is so prevalent in our culture that even die-hard anti-authoritarian parents like me can fall into the trap when we aren’t paying attention. My gentle verbal consequence hadn’t worked, so I ‘d brought out my arsenal of more and more severe punishments. I’d lost sight of the fact that if a little punishment doesn’t work, a lot won’t work any better. In fact, excess punishment almost always makes things worse.

Normal children are intrinsically motivated to learn how to get along. They are hard-wired to gain information from the natural consequences in their environment and, for the most part, they do an excellent job of learning all of our complex social rules in a relatively short amount of time. When toddlers misbehave consistently, it’s usually for one of two reasons: either they are testing to see how much power they have, or they feel badly, physically or emotionally, and lose control.

A mild natural or logical consequence, consistently applied, works extremely well for testing. For instance, my son decided as soon as he would walk that he loved to toddle down the slope of our lawn and into the street. Part of the fun was watching Mom’s horrified reaction. For that, the consequence was that he would have to go inside the house immediately — I couldn’t trust him outside. A couple of tantrums later, the problem was solved.

However, when a small child misbehaves because he is ill or feels insecure, frustrated or sad, it does absolutely no good to punish him. Sometimes even a mild negative consequence can serve to make the child feel worse and cause him act out even more.

It was clear that my son and I had a vicious cycle going. The angrier I got about his biting, the more anxious he got. And the only thing he knew to do when he was anxious was — you guessed it — bite. I had to put away my sledge hammer and try something radically different.

Inspired, I dropped all the punishments and decided to use encouragement instead. This was not a new concept – Don Dinkmeyer and Gary McKay had been pushing encouragement for years in their STEP courses and their book, Raising the Responsible Child. I knew about it and had used it successfully with my clients and my own children. Instead of punishing misbehavior or using artificial rewards, one simply uses words to encourage the opposite, more positive, behavior.

“Playing gently” was something my son couldn’t do while he was biting his friend, so I decided to encourage that. In fact, since both children had a part in keeping the aggressions going, I felt it was a good idea to encourage them both. At random, over the course of the first afternoon, I said to them, “Boy, I like the way you guys are playing gently,” or “Thank you for playing so gently with your friend.” Sometimes, I’d give them a little hug or kiss, too. I was sincere. I was truly grateful. This totally changed the atmosphere when we were together. Instead of hovering, waiting to pounce at the first sign of aggression, I could relax, my son could relax, and we all could have fun together.

For the first couple of afternoons, although the incidents were much fewer, my son continued to be aggressive. It was clear that both children were confused by the lack of any consequence for the biting and hitting. I thought about it for awhile, then decided that time away from others would be an excellent logical consequence for socially inappropriate behavior. So, if he was aggressive, I would calmly send him to his room — not for a screaming, kicking, hold-the-door punishment, but to get himself together. He would have to go all the way to his room, but he could come out whenever he was ready to play gently. (This works beautifully for a wide range of antisocial behavior, by the way. Older children can be sent to their rooms, for instance, until they are ready to be polite at the table.)

There was one bite the first day I tried the combination of encouragement and “until you’re ready” time-out. It was the last bite. I kept up the encouragement for a couple of weeks, although with much less frequency. After a while, I forgot all about it, but my son would turn to me occasionally and say proudly, “We’re playing gently, Mommy!”

He’s 13 now, and taller than I. Aggressiveness has not been a problem since he was a toddler. I guess we’ll never know if it’s because it was just a phase or because I handled it so brilliantly. We’re working on new, much subtler power issues now as he steps out, tentatively, into the teenaged world. “Until you’re ready” time-outs don’t have the same effect as they used to. I’m having to break new ground with words like “privileges” and “responsibilities.” And, of course, because I was ready for it and knew exactly what to do about it, his brothers never had problems with biting.

Then, with parenting as with the rest of life’s problems, it’s not the specific solutions that make you wiser, it’s the struggle, the process of gathering information from others and also looking into and trusting your own heart. I have no delusions of superiority. For another child and another mother, encouragement might be the absolutely worst way to handle biting. My advice to other parents is not, “Try encouragement, it always works,” but “Step back and look at the problem outside the heat of the moment — you don’t have to be an ‘expert’ to know what’s right for you and your child, you just have to give yourself the time and space to make sure you’re acting instead of just reacting.” So, if you have a little biter, use my experience as one example of what you might do, gather more advice, then go with what appeals to the wisest part of your heart. And if what you try doesn’t work, stop, think about it, and try something completely different. But please, for my sake, don’t bite the baby!

The spanking of young children that I see is nearly universal and usually relatively harmless (a light slap on the wrist or tap on the diaper). I’m not saying we should hit our children, I’m saying we all do, even though there are more effective ways of getting the same point across. And the research is still out on whether it does any lasting harm, except in as much as the more we slap our children when they’re tiny, the more likely it is that we will continue to hit them as they grow.

It’s the spanking of children OVER the age of three that’s more likely to turn into beating and abuse, which in turn is more likely to encourage the children to become violent adults. We know from Richard Rhodes’ book, Why They Kill that most if not all violent criminals were beaten as older children, into their teens. As a society, I think it’s important to think about how we can prevent violent crime. So, if we’re going to make this a social issue and get government involved, let’s go where it really counts for public safety and ban ALL spanking, no matter what the age of the child, but especially if they’re OVER three, because that’s where the real danger lies.

I’m sure you all have an opinion about this. Please don’t flood my email with the pros and cons. I know you were spanked as a child and you turned out just fine. Me too. What I’d really like to hear from you is this: tell me of an incident where you ended up spanking a child under the age of three. I’m interested in what works and what doesn’t work, so I want to know two things. Had this behavior or something very similar, occurred in the past or was it the first time it happened? And, after you spanked the child, did they repeat the behavior, or something similar, sometime in the next month or so? Please only reply if you are okay with me publishing your story (I won’t use your actual name, and I’ll fiddle with the details so no one will recognize you) in my next e-news.

Send your thoughts to beth@bethproudfoot.com. Thanks!

In recent years, more and more doctors are finding themselves having to tell parents that their children are suffering from stress-related illnesses. And parents are turning to teachers and counselors, completely flummoxed. “How can my child, who has none of the responsibilities and worries of adulthood, be stressed?” they ask.

Stress comes from two directions: what happens in one’s life, and how one interprets it. For example, imagine you’re driving on the freeway, and someone cuts in front of you. Your heart begins to race as you slam on the brakes. The near accident has activated your “flight or fight” response, your body’s immediate reaction to a perceived danger. This is stress from a bad thing happening in your life.

Now, imagine that the other car has gotten off at the next exit, and you’re continuing on your way. What are you thinking? If you’re furious at the careless driver, if you’re spending the rest of your drive imagining what you should have done to retaliate, then you’re spending all of that time adding to your stress. Your interpretation is making your body continue its “fight or flight” response long after the emergency is over. This “interpretation stress” is the kind of dis-stress that can make you ill.

Children interpret events happening around them, too, but their worlds are pretty small. What’s happening on the freeway is not going to affect them very much. What’s happening to their caregivers, though, is extremely important to them.

Let’s imagine a mother, sitting on a bench in the park, reading a book while her children play. She begins to weep, softly. Another adult, walking by, might think, “Oh, that must be a sad book.” Her child, though, is much more likely to think, “I have made Mommy sad,” or, “Mommy is sad, I have to find a way to make her happy.”

This is why, when parents come to me to ask, “How can my child be stressed?” the first question I ask is, “how are YOU doing?” You can’t hide your feelings from your kids. If you try, they may simply interpret this as additional proof that your negative feelings are all their fault. Of course, the more a particular child tends to be a worrier just because of his or her temperament, the more time they’ll spend stressing out about the things that happen to them or the stress their caregivers are experiencing.

I know you’re feeling guilty right now. Stop it! Life is stressful. Bad things inevitably happen, and few of us are serene enough to interpret everything in a benign way. We wouldn’t want to even try raising our kids in a stress-free bubble. It is the hardships in life that give us character and teach us to be better people. All we can to is to help children to deal with the life that they’ve been given. To do that, we have to give them time to play.

Your kids were meant to spend most of their time wandering outside with their buddies turning sticks and rocks and mud into imaginary people and swords and bunnies. They don’t know how to work out problems by thinking about them, they only know how to “play them through.” And today’s children are so overscheduled and over-supervised, their playtime has been reduced to almost zero. It’s stressing them out. And it’s making them sick.

Take a good look at the activities that are so tempting because they look so fun and educational, and choose between them with care. Every young child should have at least a few hours of unstructured, quiet time every day, away from all the screens (TV, computer, video game) that so dominate our modern life. Playmates are hard to find in a culture where we don’t let our kids leave the backyard, but it’s possible to give your children the buddy time they need. If your child is having headaches or stomachaches or mysterious rashes or any of the other stress-related illnesses kids are prone to, this playtime is even more critical.

Oh, and by the way, playtime is wonderfully stress-reducing for grown-ups, too!