TIME + MORE TIME = Parent

The other day I get an email from my editor, Chris Barnes; you all know him. I correspond with him from time to time writer to editor; you get the drill. He shoots me an email that I took humbly as high praise. He says you seem to have two good sons, well behaved and respectful. Chris suggests I write a column on raising kids.

What a task, I only get so much space and the space issue aside, my qualifications are far from ideal. Chris’s remarks are the remarks all of us parents long to hear. So often when we get news that we are going to hear about our children’s behavior there is always some degree of trepidation before we get a teacher, family member, civic leader or other adults remarks about our kids. Mainly because we all know the bottom line that our kid’s behavior says a lot about our behavior. If our kids carry themselves well then apparently we parents are doing our jobs, at least up to that point.

Parenting. The most important job a person can assume and one that doesn’t require training, a license or even a class before taking on this life long responsibility. Raising sons and daughters is tough to say the least and far be it for me to hand out the recipe in these pages as to how to do this job best.

Far from an expert I simply follow the advice of good parenting given me in one sentence by my late father. When my oldest was born I was a nervous wreck to say the least. My dad seeing his youngest anxious about his new role, took his pipe out of his mouth, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “David, you’re a bright boy, not that this will help you be a good parent, all you need to know is put the time in, everything else will fall into place.” I looked at my dad as though he were from Mars. “That’s it?” I quipped. “That’s all you need to do, trust me, if you put the time in, everything else will become clear.” At the time dad’s remarks didn’t feel right, I had more than 64 questions and this was before we left the hospital with our newborn son. Time is all? Has to be deeper than that.

What have I discovered along the way? Dad was right, dad is right. Time has shown me the way. It’s all about time being a parent. Being at the scout meetings, later running the scout meetings, being at the karate classes, the holiday preparations all the homework reviewing and practices. Making sure the boys have balanced meals at least a few nights a week, exposing them to different cultures, taking them to the city ( Philly mostly ) and letting them see a different world beyond our area, time on vacation, time focused on their health care. Time and again it comes down to time. Time and again the answer is time.

It’s funny as we grow up we bring up our time as kids, because we remember the times we had spent with our loved ones growing up. Memories require time, influence requires time, raising kids is a time trial. A very long, arduous, never ending, 24 hour at a time expenditure of putting in that days worth of time. Despite the amount of time I spend with my sons I know I need to spend more time with them. One of the things I need to get better at is we have all had the tendency to spend our time separately. You know how it goes; I might be busy on chores, my oldest watching TV or reading and my youngest on the ‘game cube’. We’re all in the same space but we’re not sharing our time with each other. That really bugs me, my boys know it, after an hour or two of this my alarm inside my head says ‘hey, get some time here, it’s slipping’. Probably my dad poking me from the hereafter. Right away I call the crew into the family room and we start spending our time together. I’ll hear the complaints from both of them since I’ve interrupted their terribly important activity but I don’t care, not about this, I am selfish about our time. Always have been, always will be. I really will horde it.

When it’s our time, it’s our time. I go out of my way to plan weekends and weeknights where we are all together, all the time. I need to do this, after all, my dad was an ace and if this was his advice to me, far be it from me not to take it. Tons of time with your kids has a lot of benefits. You share tons of life moments together, you get to really work on their academics, spirituality and sense of heritage and also take away the attraction for the kids to put their time into less useful and sometimes harmful things. We all know what these things are I am sure I don’t have to list them.

Sometimes we spend our time just sitting, just being, together as a family. Sometimes we read together, sometimes I get the kids to help me with chores ( this is the rarest of times by the way ). When my sons are grown and have families of their own I can look back and know that I put the time in, as much time as I could in being a parent. I can look to my sons about to have children of their own and say, all you need to do is put your time in. When they look at me with the same confused look I gave my dad that’s when I will give them a framed picture of my dad and say hang this up in your home and put your time in as you do and the picture becomes more clear, look over at your Grand Pop and say a quiet prayer of thanks for this great advice that withstood and withstands the test of….TIME.

See ‘ya around town.