Through parenting though, I have realized it's a lot like the medical field. Just like they call it "practicing medicine" because you spend your entire career doing everything you've been taught but also continuously learning and growing - so do you "practice parenting" for 18+ years. I'm only at year 14, but I still learn something new every single day. The things that worked when they were younger don't work now. I have to constantly keep practicing, learning as I go, and using my mistakes as reference for future successes. And just like in the medical field - lives are at stake.
Yet I sit here wondering how many parenting ailments we encounter and put all our efforts into treating the symptoms rather than digging deep to find the root of the problem. In the medical field, for example, if a patient has a fever we know that that means the body is fighting off some kind of something. An infection or a virus, perhaps. There's something that was introduced to our body that our body recognizes as "foreign", so it raises it's temperature to try to kill it. What do we do? We take tylenol to reduce our fever. Which is great, but that's not helping the SOURCE of the fever. We've now stopped the fever, but possibly enabled the source to continue to worsen.... until our fever comes back and we have to start all over again.
How often do we do that in our parenting? We see an unwanted behavior, and we just want it to go away. We do something, anything, to stop the unwanted behavior. The symptom. Sometimes thus enabling the unwanted behavior. While in some instances, we MUST 'reduce the fever' for the safety and sanity of everyone, we can't just leave it there. We have to find the root of the issue. WHY are they acting the way they are acting? We can give them candy to be good, or hand them an electronic device to keep them quiet, or give in to their demands to stop the tantrum; but all we've done is treated the symptom without even touching the source of it.
I deal with a lot of bad attitudes in my household right now. My own sometimes as often as the kids'. I know what to do to stop the symptom, but don't always take the time and effort necessary to address the root of the problem. I'm fully aware of how easy it is to just give in and quiet the immediate craziness, but all that's doing is leaving the door wide open for more instances of the same in the future. It's exhausting, but we have to take the time to treat the source of the issue every single time if at all possible. In the end, that will cure the issue in a quicker amount of time than if we just continuously pacify it. So that we can then move on to the next issue that will inevitably arise. I don't think any of us are getting our parenting PhD anytime soon, but we can keep practicing every single day and getting a little closer. We have VERY important patients and their lives are at stake. Who they are as adults will reflect, in at least some small way, on how we treated them as children. Did we just treat the symptoms or did we teach them the cure their ailments?
