I wasn’t sure if I should write a reflection post for the calendar year or for our baby’s birthday, but I figured I’ll aim for the calendar year and maybe it will be done by his birthday…
I have been a full-time caregiver for 10 months at this point, and a lot has changed both within and around me. There have been challenges I never expected, but more than that there have been delights I never expected. There is so much magic in every day, but wow do I have to confront some of my deeper programming every day, too! There’s just so much push-and-pull happening all the time.
Sitting down to write this review had me thinking about how we measure success as parents and people working on decolonizing our minds and relationships. I wondered whether doing a periodic review was even consistent with this, and remembered the importance of praxis in Paolo Freire’s work where he teaches that reflection is a crucial component of revolution1. So I move forward in the spirit of identifying a review process for myself that builds praxis.
how to review
Most advice for annual reviews is given to us in a work setting, where we are guided to frame all our shortcomings in a positive, constructive way, and discuss results rather than tasks. Raising children is not a job, like we have come to understand jobs within the capitalist paradigm.
Just like tending to crops, short-term results don’t necessarily make for long-term results. When we are farming land, our goal is not to strip that land of all its nutrients for this year’s crop, but to nurture the land so this year’s crop doesn’t deprive next year’s crop, and so on. A lot of the work we put in does not have measurable short-term results that translate to a job performance review. Instead, we have to wait until the following year(s) results to prove we did the right thing this year.
As a parent, I don’t believe that our input always needs to have a clear output. Sometimes the results of our efforts are postponed for processing. Part of what makes parenting so challenging is the exercise of faith in our own judgement, the part where we have to believe we are doing the best for our children without any immediate empirical feedback to prove it.
For those of us who have been conditioned to function as competent employees, jumping through the corporate hoops, we have been told that the value of our work is in its results. When parenting doesn’t deliver immediate results, it can be hard. It can feel like we aren’t “doing” anything when we don’t have measurable outcomes, and we aren’t progressing, but this in itself is a process of decolonizing. When so much of our lives have been spent measuring our competency against our contribution to the functions of capitalism, it’s a long and arduous process to decouple our competency from our performance. It’s uncomfortable and unsettling.
Contrary to a review we might write at work, parenting reviewing feels like it should be input-oriented. What did we actually do? What are we building? What are we investing? I decided that a loose house-building model would be useful for me to structure my reviews, where different components of a house represent different components of parenting.
the model
- Foundations (our values):
- What are our values and how do we see them showing up in our parenting?
- What have we learned about these values over this period of parenting?
- Have any of them modified or changed in this time?
- Framework (habits + rituals):
- What are we doing daily/weekly with our children that they can depend upon?
- Why are we doing these things?
- Structure (communication):
- How are we modeling our values through the ways we interact with our children?
- Do we believe they show up as we intend, or do we need to update the way we are interacting with our kids to align better with our values?
- Decor (education):
- How are we consciously teaching our children our values?
- What fresh approaches have worked for us in this period of parenting?
- Does anything feel stale?
- Windows (insights):
- What has this period of parenting taught us about our children and ourselves?
- Were there any surprises?
- How are we bearing up?
- Furnishing (comforting extras):
- Leaving an informal space for anything else we want to reflect upon.
doing the review
I’ll be writing a separate post with my actual reflections, based on this formula, so check back if you want to follow my progress.
My neurodivergent tendency towards procrastination means I’ll either spend weeks dabbling in this and never fully committing to filling it out, or I’ll ignore it until the day after his birthday and then scramble to do it all in one sitting. I’m aiming for the former, but I recognize that this format doesn’t really lend itself to scene setting with candlelight and a pot of tea. Instead, it will be furtive tasklist notes written on my phone whilst contact napping. Such is our present reality.
I do believe that older children should be involved in this process, but for my 10-month-old who is not ready to communicate about these concepts, we are substituting a child for a co-parent. More organized people are probably doing co-parent check-ins every month at least, but we have been living on a wing and prayer here, and chaos is god of our home. In future, it’s totally reasonable to check in with whoever is available, instead of feeling like we have to rigidly adhere to the same parties, especially if that gets in the way of actually reflecting.
If you’ve been working on your own process for a parenting review, I’d love to hear from you: how far have you gotten with it, and what has the journey been like so far?
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