Is there anything you wouldn’t do to build a stronger connection with your child?
In her profoundly simple, Connection Parenting: Parenting through Connection instead of Coercion, through Love instead of Fear, Pam Leo suggests that a big part of conscious parenting is learning how to connect with our children.
“In today’s culture, we talk about spending quality time with children. We know that children need attention, but attention is not the same as connection. We can pay attention to children and still not connect with them emotionally. Children need high quality time to meet their minimum daily requirement for connection.” – Pam Leo
This is something that really struck a nerve with me. As a former corporate crazy person and closet perfectionist, I find it all too easy to get totally caught up in my never-ending To-Do List.
When I slip into my manic must-do mode, I lose my connection to my children. They start to look like just two more objects in my bag of responsibilities that must be moved through time and space on schedule.
“Get out of bed.”
“Eat breakfast.”
“Load your backpack.”
“Go to school.”
“Do your homework.”
“Eat dinner.”
“Go to basketball practice.”
“Take a shower.”
“Go to bed.”
“Love you.”
Then I drop into bed, exhausted, missing them.
This would not be a good example of connection parenting.
In describing how to best build those all-important family bonds, Pam Leo differentiates between “quality time” and “high quality time” with our children.
Quality time means giving children our attention, as they engage in whatever activity is meaningful to then.
High quality time means connecting with our children, by engaging in that activity with them.
As I continue to work out my own “best practices” in the world of conscious parenting, this distinction makes a lot of sense. And I certainly see the impact in our family life, when the boys and I get our daily dosage of connection time.
Which is exactly why I recently found myself risking life and limb to go indoor skydiving with my children.
I think birthday celebrations are a perfect opportunity to practice connection parenting. Instead of delivering a mound of presents that will be forgotten (or in our house, destroyed “by accident”), we are starting to focus on creating special birthday memories through shared family experiences.
When my younger son recently turned ten, his birthday surprise was a trip to an indoor skydiving facility. He was ecstatic.
According to the website, we would experience the sensation of jumping from a real airplane, dropping 1,000 feet every 5.6 seconds.
I’d done a lot of research ahead of time, to convince myself that this would be a safe and genuinely enjoyable adventure. Still, as we were getting into our flight suits – complete with earplugs and crash helmets – I couldn’t help wondering where I’d left my brain.
Skydiving??
Even the indoor variety, where you are basically riding a column of air shooting up a 40 foot tall vertical tunnel, is way beyond my typical comfort zone. What was I thinking??
As we stood in line to enter the access chamber, where the noise of the giant air blower was indeed deafening, I heard in my head, as clear as day, “Moms don’t do this kind of thing.”
Dads? Yes. Grandfathers? There was actually one there, waiting patiently with his grandson. Male nannies (ours was with us), for sure.
Moms schedule the event, make the reservations and stand by cheering, maybe taking a couple photos to commemorate the fun. There were several of them there, doing exactly that.
I have six sisters and two sisters-in-law, all of whom are mothers. I wondered how many of them would engage in this insanity. Would they consider indoor skydiving a mom-friendly activity? I estimated three maybes and one definite yes... who just happens to be the other single parent in our family.
Hmm.
Gender issues and heart palpitations aside, I accepted it was too late to back out. The suit was on, helmet buckled, earplugs in place. When the instructor gave me the thumbs up, I stepped up to the doorway and he basically pulled me onto this incredibly powerful column of rushing air.
Talk about going with the flow.
It took a couple seconds to relax into a position where the 100 mph vertical wind wasn’t rushing straight up my nose. After that, it wasn’t so bad.
By my second turn in the wind tunnel, it was exhilarating.
I was floating. I was spinning. I was flying. What a rush!
The boys, of course, loved it. And dare I say, they were rather impressed by their skydiving mom. We all gave each other the thumbs up, grinning from ear to ear.
Would they have enjoyed themselves if I’d been waiting outside, snapping photos? Undoubtedly. But sharing the experience made it so much better.
We built a new connection that day. Another strand in the cord that binds us together as a family.
Maybe next time, I can talk them into painting pottery instead.
Comments