The term “helicopter parents” has recently become a popular way to describe parents who micro-manage their children’s lives. This, naturally, comes with a risk that as children get older they’ll want to break away from such close supervision and go off in the opposite direction. How can parents avoid the extremes of micro-managing at one end or ignoring the children altogether at the other?
I thought of this the other day as I was listening to Elder Richard Hinckley being interviewed about what it was like to have Gordon B. Hinckley for a father.
Here’s an excerpt – with a lesson for parents:
“Dad and Mother were, obviously, wonderfully faithful people, had great testimonies, but they didn’t dwell on that a lot. For example, I have friends who say, ‘Were your dinner conversations just kind of scripture chases?’ And I would smile and say, ‘No, we talked about 'Did you get the lawn mowed? Did you get the irrigation done? Did you prune the trees? Tell me about school – what did you learn today?' And so forth. From that standpoint I think our childhood was very very normal.
“My father never made us overly aware that he was prominent in the Church. I don’t know if that was intentional or whether that was just his nature – I think probably the latter. So we never felt great pressure. I know that some children in our situation probably feel pressure – they’ve got to be perfect, they’ve got to be good, their Dad is important, and it might reflect on their father and mother if they do something. We didn’t feel that, and I think that was a real gift that our parents gave us. We were just trusted as kids. We got into mischief but not into trouble.
“We had a wonderfully lively home. Both of my parents had wonderful senses of humor, and so, when we were together there was a lot of joking and teasing and laughter. Even our home evenings at times -- when we were very small, someone would say something funny, and we’d all just kind of get the giggles, until my father would say, ‘Well, I guess we’d better continue this next week.’
“My older sister had a very interesting experience that affected her. She was graduating from seminary, a senior in high school, and they had a rule in the seminary that year that you had to buy a seminary pin in order to attend graduation. And the pin was five dollars. That was a lot of money in 1957. She said, ‘I don’t need to go to graduation. I don’t need the pin. I’ve graduated, and I’ll get the certificate, but I don’t want to pay the five dollars.’ Well, my father, who was, I think, the stake president at the time, or perhaps a counselor, was the speaker at seminary graduation. He didn’t know anything about this – that Kathy had decided not to go.
“The seminary principal called my father, and Kathy remembers hearing from the other room his side of the conversation. The principal said, ‘Your daughter’s not coming because she doesn’t want to buy a pin.‘ He said, ‘Oh well, she’s heard everything that I have to say anyway. Five dollars is a lot of money. Let her stay home.’
“Kathy said that was the greatest moment in her life. That’s kind of the way they were. So many fathers would have said, ‘Kathy, you know, I’m the speaker – you’ve got to be there.’ Just let those things slide a little bit. We knew what was important. We knew what we shouldn’t do. We knew what we should do. But there was a lot of latitude in between those extremes.”
(Excerpt from “Conversations” on The Mormon Channel)
No comments:
Post a Comment