Never lose sight of your children!
What I mean is – always keep them on your radar. In almost every instance of a child being ‘lost’ either physically or psychologically one or both parents didn’t have them on their radar.
Now the obvious physical way to ‘lose’ your child can be in a supermarket or department store – it happened once to me, a very scary experience! It only takes a minute for you to be distracted and your child drops off the radar.
Allowing your child ‘freedom’ to roam your neighborhood at a young age isn’t a wise thing. Some people have a false sense of the safety of their neighbourhood. I remember the first time I let my sons ride together to a corner shop. The rule was “you ride down the road together and come back the same way togetherâ€. Meanwhile I stood outside our house looking down the road. Every mother should have the ability to mentally time a child’s trip beyond the confines of their home area.
Finally I saw one speck at the bottom of the road, but where was the other one? The older, more independent, child chose to go another route despite my admonitions to the contrary! Eventually he turned up but I wasn’t too happy and they probably lost the right to that freedom for some time, perhaps it was even crossed off the list.
On reflection my oldest son has always been ‘the wanderer’ – when he was barely walking his greatest pleasure was to chase birds along the shoreline. He always ran ahead of us and never looked back! Did he just have blind faith that we would always be there? I hope so.
He has criss-crossed the country too many times to count in the past couple of years. I hope his blind faith is still intact.
But there came a time just over 8 years ago when my radar was so focused on my husband in the hospital and the seriousness of his condition that although my youngest son was with me every day, I think the needs of both sons fell off my radar. Certainly I didn’t see enough of my oldest son. I put his girlfriend at the time in charge of letting me know if he was falling seriously into crisis mode, not that we weren’t all in crisis mode.
It’s a tough choice to make. But I needed to do everything I could to save their father — my only choice at the time.
Those missing years pain me now because there is no going back, you simply can’t retrieve the time you didn’t spend with your children.
In that respect I’ve had more time than most. Home education enables you to have the continuity of care, learning and family warmth that school steals – in my opinion.
My own schooling stole that time from me and also didn’t value the weekend time I should have had with my family – homework stole that time. During those years I was off my parents’ radar and they assumed that I was on the school’s radar – wrong. School only pretends to have children on their radar, as soon as anything goes wrong “it’s the parents’ fault not oursâ€.
The children are yours and they need to be on your radar all the time, especially when they are attending school. School for the most part requires fighting for your child’s rights but if your child hasn’t been on your radar from day one then it’s unlikely that you will even be aware of them when they’re at school.
Children who are mere ‘blips’, or less, on their parents’ radar seldom do well. Those parents have endless issues with their children from earliest days right through to the teenage years.
Putting your children on your radar from day one with their true needs, not your own, as the focus, will reap you rewards of the kind you cannot even imagine.
Don’t lose sight of your children!