I In our pre-adoption assessment interviews, I asked the social worker contracted to assess our preparedness for adoption if I should stop taking birth control pills. That she jumped on the question with a fair degree of horror in her voice has stayed with me. “Absolutely not!” or words to that effect. “This child is going to need your undivided attention”. Whether because our 55 minutes were up or because my mind was slow to register her response, I did not ask why.
Yet Good Enough Parenting’s baseline seems to be that parenting occupies only a third of the influence on a child’s life, once the constant needs of infancy are passed. But before I get into Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’ I need to back track to D. W. Winnicott who gave parents permission to slow down to ‘Good Enough’, saying that meeting a child’s needs about 30% of the time is good enough and promises the child the opportunity to grow in self-discovery and self-reliance[i].
Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’ says, contrary to images they may have of themselves, in healthy child-parent relationships, parents are perfectly in tune with the child around a third of the time. Another third of the time, parents struggle to work out what is wrong with their child and so are unable to meet their needs. This might be when kids are angry or crying and we don’t seem to understand why, and so they must soothe themselves and recover on their own. The final third of the time, which Tronick judged to be the most important for creating healthy attachment, is when parents are not initially in tune with their children’s needs but work to become attuned. This experience provides a safe experience of distress and resolution, which promotes general resilience demonstrating that imperfect parenting is better for kids….[ii]
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books gave me a concept in two words – ‘essential paradoxes’.[iii] Paradoxes, combining seemingly contradictory features to reveal truth, coupled with the qualifier ‘essential’, are popping up like wild daisies everywhere in my meadow. Popping up like that, these little daisies make what feels to me like tectonic shifts. I know very little about tectonic shifts but if what I do know is correct, my brain, post-tectonic eruption, is settling into whole new paradigms.
In the realm of parenting, one of those ‘essential paradoxes’ we live with comfortably or otherwise, might be the need to shift perspectives on Authoritarian, Neglectful, Permissive and Authoritative Parenting styles. On paper, the directions for parenting are printed in black and white but get a bit more smudgy in the real world, the messiness of life. Maybe just a little of each parenting style shaken together is good enough parenting.
Perhaps we start as amazing Authoritative parents with momentary lapses into Neglectful and Permissive. When our child gets that teen blast of neuronal development and hormones, at times we lose control and explode into Authoritarian mode in attempts to retain control. Top all this with moments when one parent flips to the page on Permissive parenting and the other parent says, “Nope, it has to be the page on Authoritative parenting”. As they argue, the crow flying over their heads caws, “Imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome.” (I guess the couple are sitting outside in their hot tub playing tug of war). The couple hear that irritating crow enforcing unwanted thoughts about the everyday insecurities of doing parenting right, measuring themselves against the Jones next door with their picture-perfect family. (Full disclosure on my own parental skills, I failed Child Care 12 because I couldn’t knit around the corner of a baby bonnet and never thought to get my mother to do it for me, like others did).
Somewhere I read that if we sculk about as imposters, we cannot love ourselves, and if we cannot love ourselves, we cannot adequately love another. Groan, what does that mean? How do we measure if we love ourselves? How does this uncertainty play out in our attunement with our child?
Brené Brown says … there is something that is even more essential to living a wholehearted life: loving ourselves…. It is clear from the data that we cannot give our children what we don’t have. Where we are on our journey of living and loving with our whole hearts is a much stronger indicator of parenting success than anything we can learn from how-to books.[iv]
The way this quote is phrased, it seems to me, she is suggesting loving ourselves is a journey.
Perhaps then, even before we apply Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’ to parenting, to be good enough parents, we must apply it to ourselves. Over a lifetime, in the realm of that catch-all, the ‘biopsychosocial’ framework, we are, at times, in tune with our own needs to respect/love/care for ourselves. For any number of reasons, we are not in tune with our selves at other times, but again over a lifetime, we work at becoming attuned to our needs to care for ourselves.
Honing in now how Tronick’s ‘Rule of Thirds’ might apply to adoption, I will look how the imposter blight may fester with adopters. They may be harbouring a wiggly little worm drilling holes in the certainty of their right to be legitimate parents of their ‘forever’ child, however they shield themselves with what at times sounds like a desperate affirmation. In the dream I had decades earlier, I am running with this little boy I believed to be mine from pursuers determined to take him from me because, I guess in their minds, I was not the legitimate mother of this little blondie.
In adoption story after story, it is those feelings which may sometimes be closely examined or tentatively hinted at, or at other times, outright denied. You will find stories of people who want everyone to believe, sometimes quite aggressively, the child they adopted was fully, and only ever, their god-given child. You will find books by people whose adoption experience ignited in them questions that led to academic research. You will find memoirs in which people circle their experiences as they learn to cope with what Hope and Help For Your Nerves, terms ‘fear of the fear’.[v]
Some of this insecurity is stirred up when here and there we come across stories: we read that Joanie Mitchell found the daughter she gave up at birth in favour of her career. There was no ‘breaking news’ cast for the baby girl’s adoption, only a shroud of secrecy. But now the world had righted itself again and we were happy to hear Joan Mitchell has found her long lost daughter. In memoir after memoir, reality show after reality show, the big news is the reunion of birth parents with an adoptee. The adopters, while given a quick, little and hopefully reassuring hug, with the promise “You will always be ___’s ‘real’ mom and dad”, are then often written out of the script.
Some of the insecurity comes from seeing obvious nature and nurture differences. Some insecurity comes from awareness of the adoptee’s sense of confused identity.
I have been mulling this feeling of insecurity as an adopter for a long time. My thoughts, standing before me like some security gorilla at a bar, arms crossed over a ridiculously bloated chest, have demanded I read beyond the sweet adoption stories to find a checklist against which I can determine if good enough is not just the most realistic, but actually the best parenting style for our child.
Adoption as family must begin on an accepted understanding that it is simply a different kind of family. It is then easier to see that the family is not an imposter concept of family. It is different but no less good enough. The parents are in a relationship different than that the dynamics of family in which all are biologically related. It is not imposter; it is different in its origins.
If we are his parents, are we good enough if he became ours through adoption and we parented him in a manner that was in tune sometimes, absolutely not in tune at others, but striving to become in tune?
30% in tune
Because Yasik as an older adoptee came to us just weeks before kindergarten, play with friends took up a good portion of each day. Influencing only 30% of his life was a given.
Against that 30% opportunity, were Dave and I sometimes “perfectly in tune” with Yasik? I can only judge our attunement with Yasik through to his teen years by the cuddles, laughter, turning to us in stress, sharing fun times that were woven into my memory and journal. Playing soccer or hide and seek with the dog, building rafts, camping and beach memories. Dragging us through low bush to show us a treasure he’d found, an old car battery. Yelling and laughing together with Dave while battling it out on the computer. Working with me to help beached salmon get on with their trip upstream. Confiding with us about a girl and wanting us to rate her as highly as he did.
30% not in tune
In an earlier post I shared the night I dressed Yasik for bed. I didn’t have a clean set of PJs ready for him so I put him in trunks. He started to sob into my chest. He didn’t have the language to tell me what was troubling him. Moments later Dave came in and without language was yet immediately aware that Yasik wanted a T-shirt top too.
Yasik was working on the spelling of the week and Dave, the parent preparing his young son for the future and trying to make sense of spelling drills, told him this was just the beginning. Yasik needed to learn these words so he would be able to read and write them and go on to more and more spelling. It never stops. Yasik laid his head down and wailed.
Another time, Yasik brought home a note from the teacher. It said, “Yasik has been very uncooperative today”. Dave told Yasik he would only punish him for not telling Dave what had happened, not for what Yasik had done. Yasik asked, “Even if it was nasty?”
He went on to tell Dave that “the teacher was making me read something over and over and I just didn’t want to read it over and over. I didn’t say anything bad. I just didn’t read.”
The journal doesn’t offer Dave or my response to that day maybe because it was still so fresh in our memories how much we felt for Yasik in that situation. The journal does however note how often we felt we didn’t know what we were doing nor were we there for Yasik. We were parents[who] struggle to work out what is wrong with their child and so are unable to meet their need.
What strikes me about Edward Tronick’s second ‘third’ is that there is a sort of dusting off of the hands, with a ‘Well that’s that. It is what it is.’, no reparations possible here, justifiably or otherwise. We could be there to read to Yasik at night and practice reading with Yasik as homework helpers, but I was at work, not home-schooling, and Dave was at school or work. And that is actually the way life works. Child at school under the supervision of others for 3 to 7 hours each week day, parents elsewhere. As I have already written in Defining and Distilling Neglectful/Uninvolved Parenting the female judge in Scott Turow’s novel is being pressured by her daughter to be allowed to stay home from school. She is a busy judge starting a high-profile case so she cajoles, threatens, manipulates and promises future impossible temptations. Someday, I always promise, it will be as she asks…. But not, of course, today. Today there is duty…. I must go off to my other world….[vi]
Even if we had home-schooled, our child would have been in dreamland for at least 1/3 of the 24 hours each day offers. If he had a bad dream we might have taken him into our bed or comforted him but if he flailed about and we were needing what sleep we could scrape out of that night to meet the demands of the day to come, we may have said, “Enough now, off to your own bed”. The unexpected may have come up and we didn’t pick him up on time from school; he had to deal with a few scary moments of ‘Where are they?’. If he was too short for the school toilets, we weren’t there to help him figure out how best to pee. Other times we simply made the wrong parenting choice and it was irreversible. I was country at heart, not urban, and had this fantasy that Yasik too would have a much richer life in a rural setting. Just as he finished elementary school and was about to enter middle school, we sold the first home our child had become attached to, a child who had spent his first year with unstable parents, then a year and a half in a hospital and 2 years in an orphanage before moving into a new country, new family, new friends and new routine, with the new family at his side about a third of the time. A Google quickie says that the disruption of moving is one of the 5 major stress events in a child’s life. The only argument Yasik could come up with to show us he was worried about moving was to remind us that this home he definitely didn’t want to leave had the attraction of being right next to a major thoroughfare, “We get to see accidents here.”
We moved to a new neighbourhood, one where most of the kids on the block had long established relationships. Our adult to-do list didn’t include helping him negotiate a new social structure. Yasik’s yelling and door slamming we too easily translated as another message. I write at one juncture: trying to stay on top of things but it feels like we never quite do.
30% working to get in tune
In the last-minute rush to get him off to school one morning, I wanted to check that he was ready for spelling. ‘Lost’ flashed a neon warning light across his face. I stopped, called him to me, held him, fighting tears and said we will go over them together. He lay against me, not holding back at all and then spelled them all well. This from a kid who was still struggling with language. Another night Yasik and I were saying good night to ‘Dear God’. I said, “Thanks for helping Yasik with his spelling”, and he pipes in, “I got them all right God”.
There was one nice plus in the move to the country, a very big hot tub. Though I have noted often enough, not only because that damn crow was relentless, but because it was actually a fact, Dave and I were aware from time to time that we were not yet ready to write a self-help on parenting. And so we conferenced at the end of the day in that relaxing tub – arguing heartily for varying positions. Yasik’s early forays into the world of girl-boy were, as I have said before, well out of my personal experience and maybe not well-exampled by Dave’s experiences. Or were they? His mother would show up at a party and drag him out.
We were savvy enough to understand that some of what we were dealing with was transitioning to the teenage brain. Though Yasik had new curiosities igniting his neurons, those neurons may not yet have found the best synapse or were still in need of a few years of pruning. What do teens do with sensations of independence they don’t really understand but test out? They sometimes get frustrated when the results aren’t great. Yasik would pull out these cool words to spit at us when he was angry at some thwarting. A moment later we would see the tiniest bit of uncertainty as he watched for the results, even some surprise and definite discomfort. Oh, that didn’t go well. He was a kid working on the sensations of growing up. Our role, when we could or were up to it, was to handle this experimenting with care. As Dave said to me, and I knew to be true of my own parents, “I knew my mother loved me but she didn’t always know how”.
That old hot tub witnessed more than one session with parents who dearly loved their son and though not always initially in tune with his needs, worked to become attuned.
Footnotes
[i] https://www.ellisnicolson.com/blog/being-a-good-enough-mother-and-the-myth-of-perfection/
https://www.todaysparent.com/family/parenting/good-enough-parenting
[ii] Johnson, Pip, MPsych, PsyBA-Clin. Psych “Good Enough Parenting”
Forest for the Trees August 6, 2021
[iii] Nafisi, Azar Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books Random House, 2003, 86
[iv] Brown, I Brené The Gifts of Imperfection Hazelden Publishing, 2020, xxiv, xxv
[v] Weekes, Dr. Claire Hope and Help For Your Nerves 1969
[vi] Turow, Scott The Laws of Our Fathers 1996, 66
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