It has taken me 14 long years, but I think I have discovered the secret to parenting: improvisation.
The ability to solve problems in the moment – to improvise – requires experience, confidence and a sack full of magic tricks.
Here are two examples of spontaneous parenting from just a 10-day span.
Mark KennedyWhile shopping for groceries with my two sons, ages 9 and 14, I experienced a momentary brain lock about their favorite brand of pancake syrup.
“Oh, what is it called?” I whispered to myself.
“It’s called Ain’t Yo Mamma,” my older son said confidently. “Ain’t Yo Mamma syrup. Actually, I think we buy Ain’t Yo Mamma Lite.”
I frowned and instantly turned to my 9-year-old son, who is our family’s Mr. Peabody. Years of living with these two has taught me that our 9-year-old is the go-to child for fact retrieval. Using him as the family’s random access memory has become second nature.
“Actually,” our younger son corrected, “we buy Aunt Jemima Lite syrup.”
A couple days later, I learned that even a smart 9-year-old occasionally needs a miracle.
As we were leaving for school, he came up to me in a panic. In fact, he had that “I’m about to cry” look on his face that every parent knows.
“Daddy, I forgot to study my spelling words!” he said.
I glanced at my watch and quickly computed that we had about 90 seconds to learn a list of spelling words. As a parent skilled in improvisation, I exhaled and told myself, “I got this.”
But by then I only had 88 seconds left.
Even though my 9-year-old has a good memory for facts, he is not an intuitively good speller – a problem that seems to run in our family. Studying his weekly spelling list is usually a two- or three-night process for him.
“Just relax,” I told him as my brain spun for a solution. “Get our your word list, and let’s look at it. Quickly. Quickly.”
He produced the list and I immediately dug into my writer’s toolkit to improvise a solution. I examined the spelling words and instantly saw a pattern. All but one of the words contained an “ir” or a “ur” interior letter combination. I quickly determined that our third-grader would have to learn these words as sight words, not phonetically. His ears would be useless on this quiz.
I mentally sorted the words into two lists, and realized that to memorize one list is to know them both. If you know all the “ur” words, for example, the words containing “ir” are learned by default.
“Listen and repeat after me,” I told my son, who was looking at me with the earnestness of a crippled child in the presence of a faith healer: “The kid with curly hair turned and hurt the nurse.”
“What?” he said.
“Just say it,” I insisted. “We don’t have time to argue.”
“The kid with curly hair turned and hurt the nurse,” he repeated dutifully.
“Now, if one of your spelling words is in that sentence, it has a ‘ur’ in the middle,” I explained. “That’s all you have to remember to ace your spelling test today. All the other, except ‘serve,’ are ‘ir’ words.”
He looked at me with amazement.
I’m sure this little instant tutorial broke all kinds of teaching rules, but when it’s 7:43 a.m. and your child is about to have a conniption, you do what you must.
I realize that hurting nurses is an unspeakable thing to teach a child. But hey, if I had three minutes instead of 90 seconds I would have thought of something more politically correct, maybe like: “The hurt child with curly hair turned to the wonderful nurse.”
In the meantime, I will continue to practice improvisational parenting.
Because, well, that’s the way I roll.
Mark Kennedy is a resident of Signal Mountain. His columns appear in the Times Free Press on Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. Contact him at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.