Behave

I just may have been a child who was asked to bite her tongue a time or two, maybe even persuasively requested to behave when the hopes of me doing so voluntarily weren't exactly stellar. But never, ever ever ever, were my thoughts or my individualism or my desires to search and learn nailed into a wooden chest and sealed forever. Rather the opposite was true. I don't remember a time when I wasn't encouraged to search. Or a day when I was told no "just because". There were rules and I got those rules and from everything I can gather, they led me to be a somewhat not freakishly unadjusted individual. Maybe even a good parent.

So as we search to find the "right" parenting strategies for ourselves, of course we look back on our own upbringings. And let's be real folks, they were D to the I to the F to the...well, they were just different. And neither involved anything anywhere close to the rhyming symbolics of hip hop lyrics. But the one commonality, without doubt, is the one that woke us up each morning knowing it was OK to question and consider and reflect and then act. Not just listen and follow, but actually be a real person. And I'm very certain that this single life strategy may just be the single bit of useful parental advice that we'll pass on to our child. Question, prepare, think. BE real people.

Obviously a post like this doesn't come from nowhere. Obviously we encountered folks who (in our humble opinion) might just not be questioning or preparing or thinking. And maybe just then we found our own little version of requesting ourselves to bite our own tongues because, well, sometimes you just have to behave.