Trial By Fire / On-the-Job Training – How We Learn Parenting

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to how our years of schooling prepare us so little for some of the most critical aspects of our lives.  The most important thing I learned from formal schooling was how to do math (not to in any way diminish the importance of this!).

I had a mentor early in life that taught me to seek out knowledge and be my own teacher.  Again, something I did not learn in high school or college but that may be the single most important lesson of my life.  My entire professional career has been built around taking on challenges and new technologies with very little base knowledge, educating myself and “figuring it out.”

The Trial By Fire and On-the-Job-Training of Parenting

I remember in High School seeing girls going from here to there carrying baby dolls.  These girls had taken a home-economics elective (and no, I don’t remember a single boy that took this elective).  The girls in this class were given these baby dolls for one week in the semester.  At random times, the babies would start to cry and you had to turn and hold a key in the doll’s back for a random period of time to get it to stop (this, presumably, represented time spent feeding or comforting the baby).  The doll supposedly recorded this interaction so you could be graded on your attentiveness.

I didn’t take this class, so maybe there was an extensive curriculum built around these crying dolls.  I suspect not.  I suspect the message was “Babies are annoying.  They wake you up.  They make noise.  Sometimes it seems like they’ll never stop.  Don’t be a teen mom.”

I became a father at 31.  Younger than some, but older than most (in some cases, much older!).  I was excited to be a dad (and still am) and read a lot on the subject (most books on fatherhood are awful – see my Recommended Books).  I also had years of mental notes / advice and time visualizing what kind of father I wanted to be.

When my first daughter arrived, I felt epically unprepared to be caring for this five-pound person.  Scared to death might sum it up.  It wasn’t a question of whether or not I would screw-up my kid… but how badly.

In the end, I did the only thing that there is to do: man-up and figure-it-out.

Change a diaper – check.  Prepare a bottle – check.  Feeding, burping, cleaning up spit-up – check, check, check.  Even baby-bath-time.  A little reading, a patient wife and a lot of love to smooth over my inevitable mistakes.  Slowly, my on-the-job training progressed into me becoming a competent parent.

One of the pieces of advice I had gotten (from one of the best fathers I know) was to take your child and get out of the house on your own.  Early and often.  This gives mom a chance to rest / recover and it “gives you a chance to bond with your child” – read: “let your trial by fire begin!”  So, when my first daughter was six days old, she and I got out of the house to go to a local sports bar to watch the Michigan Football game.  She slept most of the time (as newborns tend to do).  Unfortunately, when she wasn’t sleeping she was doing some of the other things babies love to do: eating, pooping and spitting up — these last too in copious amounts.  But a couple of costume-changes (and a lot of wet wipes…) later, we got through it and I was a more experienced parent.  And Michigan beat Notre Dame, so all was right with the world.

MCD & Daughter watching 1st Michigan Game

MCD & Daughter watching 1st Michigan Game

Kids are different, parents are different.  It would be great if society spoon-fed us the basics, but in the end these experiences help define us as parents.  There are rarely “right ways and wrong ways” — usually we end up with what “worked and didn’t work” for ParentA with ChildX during our on-the-job training.

In the sequel to this post, I’ll share my thoughts on how we learn personal finance.

What do you think?  What were your key education sources on parenting before and after becoming a parent?  Share below!

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