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Parenting Class

Why we are challenged to tell the difference between good and bad parents

By Shamaine DanielsPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 5 min read
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I noticed her smiling, full of sheer joy. She was playing with my eyeshadows. My very expensive eyeshadows were colorfully strewn across my bed with her playing with their textures and expertly breaking them up. I grabbed her and tickled her and started to teach her colors from the colorful flakes on the bed. This was a moment of joy for me, because I knew my daughter was appropriately interested in colors AND that I had the ability to repurchase those shadows.

Baby playing with makeup brush

I waited for her to take her nap to clean up the mess she made and wondered to myself why I didn't become upset. I remember when I first moved to the U.S. and becoming very angry with my little brother for damaging costume earrings I purchased after waiting for months for them to go on clearance. Looking back, the rage wasn't warranted, but those earrings were a big deal to me and I couldn't replace them, they were a symbol of me becoming American which to my young mind also meant the eventual elimination of the bullying I was experiencing at school-if I could only show my classmates how much like them I was, they would stop bullying me and when my little brother destroyed one of the few chances I had to prove my acculturation, I knew it meant months more of bullying.

We like to think of parenthood as existing in a vacuum, there are good parents and there are bad parents, and that is just that. We don't ask ourselves about the systems we put in place that make it harder or easier for parents to be good or bad parents.

I think back to a family friend who made a living in what was technically a sweatshop. She had contracted with a major company to sew for them, the payments she received were pitiful and over the years she had to keep recruiting her children to help her meet her ever-growing sewing quotas or lose the family income. The family lived under constant stress that CYS would find out that two minor children were producing clothes so they were the kind of family where friends could never come over for a visit. Neighbors accused them of being abusively strict because friends couldn't even hover around the entrance to the house. But had that brand paid that mother well for the work she did, she would have never needed to recruit her kids into working and her kids would have been able to have guests over like a normal family-like a normal middle-class family.

I think back to a mom I once met. She was brought up in the foster care system and her only parenting model stemmed from the rules in that system. By the time she became older she decided to be a foster parent herself. I remember her yelling very loudly at her son because he started to play with my laptop. I reassured her that it was okay as it was sturdy and insured. She apologized to me for yelling because she was stressed that if he broke it, she couldn't afford to replace it; for her, there would be long-term consequences to her being considered a bad parent for not preventing the hypothetical damage to the laptop so the stakes were high. Once I reassured her that the stakes weren't as high as she initially believed them to be, her demeanor changed and she reverted to the loving parent she had been before her son started playing with my laptop. Her parenting was determined not by goodness or badness, but by the consequences the systems she was in would met out to her.

I think about another friend. He has so many issues born out of his dad having been a construction worker. His dad, basically worked all the time and away from home. He describes his upbringing as one by a single mother, with a father on the phone line. To this day he sees his father as a terrible father because he was never around, but the truth is that in an economy that let them have their minimum material needs met at the expense of meeting minimal emotional needs, no one really knows whether his dad was good or bad, because our economy never gave him the chance to parent.

I am a mother now and there are moments of healing between my mother and myself that are born out of conversations about my daughter. One day, while complaining about my daughter not eating and throwing all of her food on the floor, my mother yelled at me to not hit my daughter. I yelled back "why would I do that?" followed by "wait, why was it okay for your generation to hit and ours?" and she replied "because ours couldn't afford to replace the wasted food back then, but yours can now so you don't need to make the same choices we made" It was the closest thing to an acknowledgement I will probably hear from her. Just like my parental decisions, my parents' parental decisions were vastly shaped by the systems they were in.

Toddler eating while spilling a lot of yogurt on the table

Thinking about parenthood outside of the systems people parent in, makes it easy to judge individual parents for choosing between bad options and frees us from working for the changes that encourage better parenting options.

I am incredibly lucky. I can afford to lose those eye shadows. I have been able to spend way more time with my daughter than most mothers can. My life is not luxurious in any way, but I have the resources I need to make it easy for me to be a good mother. If you see me spending time with my daughter playing games or walking EXTREMELY slowly on the sidewalk, you may think of me as being a good parent, but I am just a parent who has time to spend with my child. I don't know what kind of parent I would be if I had to work full-time or was paid so poorly that any damage my child made was high stakes or if I had a boss that was so miserable, they left me too emotionally drained to be present for my child once I came home from work.

This Mothers' Day, I can be forgiving of my parents and my cousin's parents because I better understand that many parenting decisions are more than just a question of parenting, they are a question of class.

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About the Creator

Shamaine Daniels

https://linktr.ee/shamainedaniels

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