Old-Fashioned Mothering

I was thinking yesterday about how often I’ve seen mothers and children together (obviously not a strange thing) and there was nothing going on between the two but yelling. Mom yells at the kid. The kid is sullenly silent, or weeps. Sometimes you see moms touch their kids only to force them to comply with some command. It’s seldom any more we hear a real conversation between a mother and a child, as if there was a chasm neither of them could cross.

Old-fashioned mothering was definitely “hands on.” Mother took her sprout by the hand when they walked together. She put her hands on her child’s to guide them as they learned new things. Hugs for enthusiastic responses, and kisses for all wounds and injuries were frequent. It was common to see a mother with her hand on the head or around the shoulders of her children. Most moms were good at what they did, because they had learned the finer points from their moms, who’d learned them from THEIR moms.

Mothering is more than cooking and washing for children. And it’s been a long time since the child-labor laws went into effect, so children aren’t servants for their parents, either. But sometimes it’s hard to tell. Children with little or no attention or interaction at home become bullies and discipline problems at school. For a child, even negative attention is better than no attention at all, so kids learn to behave in ways that will get them noticed. In the good old days, even mothers who were not thrilled to find themselves in the role of mothers did good jobs; today, women who don’t wish to become mothers find people to kill their unborn babies. With this mindset, it’s not surprising that mothers have no feelings for their children, or the desire to show them any affection.

Grooming kids is an important part of mothering. Combing a child’s hair, wiping a runny nose or a tearful eye is the easiest part of the job. Changing diapers can be a little less enjoyable, but until the child is old enough to take preventive measures, poopy diapers are a fact of life for mothers. Blood, boogers, and barf are the usual seasonings for the mother-child relationship. And, anybody who has smelled a sweaty 9-year-old boy knows that some things stink more than we have the capacity to tolerate, and “bathing” should be very high in the short list.

Mothers who spend minimal time touching, grooming, or loving their children are cheating those children of a normal childhood. A television or video game or computer makes a nice toy. But nothing beats the conversations between mother and child for sheer enjoyment. If kids say the darndest things, lots of moms will never know it, because they don’t spend any time listening to their children. If the majority of verbal communication between parent and child is yelling, accusations, and threats, the kids are going to clam up around their parents. Ignoring a child’s opinions, belittling them and responding with threats is a good way to turn a child into a taciturn, secretive sneak.

“Hit ‘em and hug ‘em,” an experienced old grandmother was heard to comment. What was meant was this: You can spoil a child with permissiveness, but you can’t spoil them with LOVE, and permissiveness does not equal love. It equals laziness and lack of caring. Discipline of young children is so important that the child will take legitimate, commensurate discipline and punishment as signs of real love. When my children were small, we had a little bedtime ritual in which I would turn each child over my knee and with a couple of mild swats say, “Spank them every day, and you make them good!” Then a kiss followed and off to bed for them. At some point the “spankings” stopped, but my daughter came to me one day and asked, “Don’t you love me any more, mama?”

“Of course I do, sweetheart? What makes you think I don’t love you?”

“You never spank me any more,” was her reply.

Being willing to do the dirty jobs should be a requirement for motherhood. And the second one should be a listening ear and an attentive eye. “Mom! Watch this!!” is music to most mothers’ ears. That’s why most good moms have calluses on their knees. All the good moms I know of pray continually for their children, and it doesn’t stop when the child is grown or the mother is old. I’m glad I learned how to be a “hands-on” mom. It has come in very handy as a grandmother.