How to help children ‘make meaning’
Before I had children, my fantasy of motherhood was the experience of a mother duck. My children would cutely follow along behind me as I introduced them to the world. Eventually, they would learn to get around, feed themselves and avoid dangers. The picture I had in mind was relatively tidy.
This is not to say that I did not have awareness of greater challenges I would have as a mother. I came from a relatively large family, and by the time I’d grown and gotten my license as a foster parent, I was working in a ministry for children, teens and families. But parenting is one of those things that is almost always messier than we imagine, no matter how experienced we are.
People are meaningmakers, and our children look to us for guidance as they make meaning. Naturally
in the course of family life, we help them make sense of the world, find their place in it, and make their own contributions. We do this in the midst of life’s messiness, its ups and downs, and the complications of our own limitations.
We help our children with meaning-making in all kinds of situations. When we encourage them to brush their teeth, we teach them they are worthy of self-care. When we take responsibility for our mistakes, we teach them about the importance of apologizing and making things right.
We help our children make meaning of the things they observe about the world when we explain racism, ableism, homophobia, or transphobia, and then give them tools to resist these forces. We help them make meaning when we teach them in a pandemic that one of our most important jobs is to care for one another. Our teaching begins as soon as our children are in our lives.
I remember once when one of my children was around nine months old, we were playing in a sandbox at a playground, and another mother and her 2-year-old came to join us. This mother and I sat together while the children played happily. Then suddenly, the 2-year-old reached over and intentionally hit my child on the head.
As I comforted my child, it occurred to me that thankfully he had never before experienced violence. This was his first encounter with the capacity of humans to cause one another pain. My job was not just to comfort him, but to restore his sense of safety in relationship to others. Even though he was just a baby, I was building a framework for meaning-making in light of the human capacities both to help and to harm.
Now the only children in my home are teens, and looking back, I think I did get to have something of the “mama duck experience” when they were younger. My children gave me a lot of opportunities to introduce them to the world. They looked to me to show them how to understand things. They asked me “why,” “how,” “when,” “what” and
“who?”
But unlike baby ducks, perhaps, my children weren’t just looking to me for this meaning. My son learned something about his relationship with the world when at age 3 he picked out pink slippers at the store, and I bought them for him. He also learned something about his relationship with the world when he decided that even though in our family "pink is for everybody," he didn't want to wear his favorite pink slippers at preschool because not all families had the same perspective.
My son’s decision to avoid doing something that could get him teased was part of his meaning-making, and if I hadn’t realized it earlier, it would have been a great cue that I was going to need a community around me to help reinforce our family values, especially the countercultural ones.
That’s one of the reasons we are part of a religious community, in our case a Unitarian Universalist one. Because people are makers of meaning, and meaning arises largely in community, it is really difficult to raise children without a community around us reinforcing positive values and helping our children find their place and make contributions.
With teens at home, even in a pandemic, it feels as if they look to me for very little. They are individuating. I am grateful to know that when they look outward, there is a community around them that knows and loves them and is at the ready to help guide them as they find their way in the world.