Travel Tuesday
Picking up on the great post on Family Friday (the 13th) “Who Has the Energy to Be a Helicopter Parent?”; discussions like this always raise the same kind of questions for me… what is the parent trying to prevent/hide by acting this way? What are they so potentially scared of by being part of the global citizenship. Quite often, if the surface is scratched deep enough, it's got just as much to do with the protection of the parent as with the protection of the child.
Whilst I acknowledge the following would be the ultimate in living nightmares, but what if the now delightful 11-year-old Daughter turned into an axe murderer? Obviously many of the questions that could immediately come to mind could revolve around how did I, as the parent, contribute to such madness? How on earth did this happen? Why me? I know, lets just prevent it from being even slightly remotely possible and morph into a helicopter parent instead! That’ll stop it from happening for sure…
Learning to let go is difficult there is no doubt. Parenting to smother has to eventually do some kind of ongoing deep-seated damage surely. How many of our own parents, for example, do we see where they have been brought up in a particular way, only to have it manifest in the way they in turn parent. Not always to the betterment of the recipients either.
Can parenting of the helicopter variety really work? In my opinion, I think not. It can’t. It’s not sustainable; it’s not real world, and its certainly not doing your child any favours in terms of setting them up to realise their full potential. Instead, my personal preference is to use the energy in ways I have to influence Daughter, i.e. by role-modelling the behaviours that I deem suitable and necessary. Hence why I choose to travel as often as I can with Daughter. If my intention is to give her the opportunity to develop into a “global citizen”, then it is my role to introduce her to as much of the globe as possible. The why for me is that I believe that with a worldly perspective, we as a Daughter/Mother team are more likely to be successful in achieving this. (I’ll have to let you know the outcome in time though!)
Mind you, why? is not a good question to ask. People’s opinions are what they find acceptable to give as an answer in general and in the context of the questioner. As Mark Earls points out in his 2003 book, “Welcome to the Creative Age”, we are not rational but we are good at rationalisation. He convincingly states that attitudes not only tend to follow behaviour, but that attitudes and opinions are best understood as a function of behaviour rather than their cause. As he puts it, “you think your girlfriend is attractive; after all, she is your girlfriend”. Assuming he is mostly correct (he, and others, do have supporting evidence), behaviour, or another way to look at it – action, is so very very important. And I for one intend being as guilty as possible in displaying the behaviour I want Daughter to emulate, most of the time. To that end, travelling, as one of those actions, factors very high.
Earls goes on to say the following:
“…the reality of most peoples working life today and the not-so-secret ambitions we have are in stark contrast to each other. As we travel more (long-haul package travel is the fastest growing sector of the travel market) and experience more (in two generations, Indian good has gone from being an exotic and over-spiced minority taste to one of the most popular cuisine in the UK), we can’t but notice that the gap between the reality of working lives and our dreams and ambitions has widened to breaking point.” What an important lesson to learn. Part of my action, my role modelling is also representative of the way I set up my working life. I’m not the entrepreneurial mother for nothing! (And that’s a whole different discussion.)
Happy Travels
the entrepreneurial mother™
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