The Four Rs of Parenting. Carmen Bynoe Bovell

      Chapter 1

      How Parents View the Role of Parenting

      What are your thoughts about parenting?

      Marguerite Anderson

      I think, generally speaking, we basically approach parenting as we approach anything in our lives. We are the sort of people who like to travel; we believe in a very broad worldview and caring for people and showing our caring through basically how we treat each other and how we interact with others in the world. And we want our son, George, to understand that, and we want him to mimic our behavior and absorb how we treat others in the world. So parenting is about caring. I guess my main thought is, I like it, it’s rewarding, it’s worth the hard work. My husband, Sean, and I agree it’s the most rewarding hard job we’ve ever had. We give up a lot to do it, but we get such great rewards for doing it. I love seeing the person he’s becoming. George is kind; he’s a thoughtful child; he likes to share. I can see that he likes to make his playmates feel happy, and he’s a jovial child, and it’s wonderful seeing him grow into the person that he is going to be. I think I like parenting, and I feel lucky that I’m able to raise a child, and we got lucky with the kid that we have. He’s a very easy baby, a very easy toddler so far. He’s fourteen months old.

      Christopher Blanchard

      I would say, I think parenting is probably the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s a life-changing experience, being a parent, being that person that your child looks up to, and you know, I’m happy to be there to provide and care for that person that I cocreated, and I definitely enjoy the experience. I say it’s a life-changing experience for me because of having created another human life and being one of the main persons that need to care for, nurture, and be there for the person that I cocreated. So it’s something that’s very, very important and special to me, in that I definitely got something I always wanted. It’s more than everything I thought it would be, and I see parenting as a very, very important responsibility.

      Holly Blum

      From my personal experience as a parent, one of the things I think parenting has made me much more aware of, and intentional about, is figuring out what were my values and what I really want to intentionally and thoughtfully impart to my daughter. Somewhere in my mind and in my heart, I knew what my values were, but then what does that look like? And more intentionally, when I’m trying to communicate those values, how does that affect my behavior? I’m looking for consistency between my behavior and my values, and this is what I think is important. Her father and I had quite a few conversations about that because I didn’t know whether we shared the same values. It was a talk we had never had, but I didn’t think he was as thoughtful about parenting, and maybe that was partly influenced by the fact that I was an early childhood teacher. I think I parented in a way that tried to provide opportunities where her experiences would be consistent with those values. For example, when I first moved into Virginia, I was naive and assumed that the world was pretty well integrated because that had been my experiences in most of the places I lived, so it never occurred to me to really take a look at the demographic of the neighborhood. I was just focused on what I could afford, but when we moved, I looked around me, and I was surprised by how homogeneous the community was. To this day, her dad reminds me I was ready to pack our bags when I realized the lack of diversity and worried about what if the neighborhood doesn’t change.

      Respect for diversity is one of the values that guided my parenting socioeconomic and cultural diversity; I don’t think I gave a lot of thought to language diversity. That awareness came when I started to experience the impact of culture and language and how they interacted. That came a little bit later in the game when I had the fortunate experience to find work with the Fairfax County Head Start Program.

      Another value was being respectful of other people’s thinking and ways of doing things; therefore, I wasn’t uncomfortable, for example, sending my daughter to a Lutheran Preschool, although our cultural heritage is Jewish. The Lutheran preschool was the best and most developmentally appropriate preschool in my community that I knew of, and I wasn’t intimidated by having the conversations about her having to go to chapel twice a week. Other people live other ways; not everybody in the world is Jewish. When she came home from preschool, she asked questions and made comments, and I saw it as an opportunity to have conversations with her about how other people may think differently, or let’s look at what we have in common, everybody is special, etc. I felt that those were fine messages that afforded us a chance to talk about different religious backgrounds, experiences, and traditions.

      Respect for your elders was another of my values. You don’t have to like everybody, but you have to be respectful of everybody.

      Marlon Bovell

      As a parent, you are fully responsible for your child, to teach them to be successful or responsible contributors to society. I think parenting is a 24-7 job. It’s tougher than you would ever think it would be, both before becoming a parent, and as a parent. I now see where my parents were coming from with all the things they used to say. I still hear those things in my head today, and I repeat some of those same phrases to my kids. I understand now what I did not understand as a child, and I try to keep that in perspective when I discipline or talk to my kids even though it’s tough. I keep in perspective that kids don’t really understand what you’re telling them because they can’t project into the future. I try to use terms they understand and explain to them the possible outcomes to their actions. I have a lot of information, and I can project into the future what will or can happen based on their current actions. For instance, not wanting to clean their room or not wanting to put their device down and do homework without us having to tell them to do it. Also, one of the main things I always tell them is, do now what you can do today. For instance, my daughter may have an assignment that’s not due until Wednesday and it’s Monday; she would do very little or none on Monday. I tell her do as much as you can today; if you can finish your homework on Monday, finish it, because you never know what’s going to come up on Tuesday, so do as much as you can today to be prepared for the next day.

      Robert Bovell

      I believe parenting takes the collective effort of both mother and father. In that way, a child understands the roles of man/father and woman/mother who together raise the child using a balanced approach. When parenting is one-sided, sometimes we leave out certain components, whether it’s from a male role-model standpoint or a female role-model standpoint, and the child has to rely on outside sources for those things that make them function with a balance in and out of the household or with other family members. So I believe it’s key that both parents play a very active role in the upbringing of the child, whether they’re married or they’re not living together.

      The role of parents is very vital, because if parents don’t take an important stance, we then rely on the streets, the church communities, the schools, and peers to play a role in raising our children, and that’s when we complicate things. When there’s one parent, if that parent merges the components and balances the roles of mother and father and interjects that education equally into the child, you can get productivity from the child, but I find it to work better when a father, whether the mother and father are married or divorced plays an active role in the upbringing of a child.

      There are things that a child can ask a mother and a mother can give a more subtle or passionate response to the child that helps the child better understand a particular behavior or situation. A good way to look at that is the following. A lot of times when we talk to our children, whether it’s a mother or father, a father may say, “I think you may need to ask your mom when she gets home or when you can find time to talk to her,” and the mother may say, “I think you need to talk to your father,” or “I’m going to