Beyond Equality: Unlock Your Personal Power

Current parents have inherited the drive to find equality from their parents. A long-standing foment of women's rights upset the status-quo significantly some fifty years ago. Though women had long since gained the right to vote, bra-burning Women's Liberation movement wanted a complete overhaul of gender role definition.
I was a 18 yrs old at the time, and have observed and lived through much of the aftermath of the gender revolution.
The basic problem with the stance of gender revolt is you start with the idea "I am not being treated as equal to others (men)." The question became "What do I have to do to be treated equally?" The answer that many women chose in the late 60's early 70's was to leave the primary place of homemaker and get a job. This was not always a well thought out process. Oftentimes the jobs available for the training a woman had then were low-paying. The children she had at home still needed to be cared for, and frequently after the free relatives got burnt out, the cost of a babysitter used up what was left after expense of work clothes, lunches and transportation to job.

Yet many women felt driven to prove their equality to men, in the work place. That said, childcare was not even an industry yet. Who took care of the children was based on availability and affordability; not ability and accountability. The thinking of the time was nurturing children was something any woman could do naturally, and was second-rate to the imagined status a woman could attain in the "promised land" of the work world. Little thought was given to the quality of care the children received: "Park them with someone who was willing to watch them".

As a result, many children then did not receive some of the basic early child education that we look for today. The irony is that those same children of yesteryear are the parents of today's children. Some of these many parents are frustrated, caught between today's research that demands their parenting interaction and the deficits they may still face because they had not received that level of parental interaction themselves.

A specific example is early child reading (literacy) : Today it is well-understood through years of educational research, that where many dropouts were neglected comes back to their early years. No books in the home is one thing they have in common. This implies that their parents had little interest in reading also. This can be traced back to the previous generation of parents who spent little time reading to them when they were children, and babysitters who did not see themselves as educators either. If they did not have the recommended lap-reading before kindergarten, these parents of today may have struggled themselves with literacy when they were in school. As a result, reading would not be their favorite thing. They would not feel confident that they knew enough about reading to introduce it to their child. They would disconnect from literacy as important. Somehow they "made it" without all that, so would their Aston or Tiffany.

Another look at early child research can give a key to unlock this trap, that even parents who don't regard themselves as educators do have the power to help their babies and toddlers develop lifelong learning skills for a brighter future. Though they may have had to struggle through school when they were younger themselves, they would be surprised how easy it is to share a picture book with their child. Research shows that as little as 20 minutes a day, sharing the characteristics of pictures in a book with a child, in a cuddly happy way, can give that child many kinds of preparation and nurture needed.

See Teddy Bear's Favorite Pictures by Nancy Cloyd on amazon.com/books/children for simple guidelines (for parents with tired brains) as how to share a pleasant nurturing quality time with toddlers and up. On that website, you can sample the pages of the book to see this simple method. When followed in a loving happy way, "reading pictures" with their child 20 minutes a day is the key. Recommend it to any reluctant-to- read parents you know to get them started. They can unlock their personal power to make life better for their child.