Parental Time-Warp Is To See Your Parenting Plans Put On Hold As Life Takes You In The Opposite Direction And Time Slips Through Your Fingers

Parental time-warp is to make parental plans and to know what it is you want to do, only to see those plans put on hold as life dictates your time and moves you in the opposite direction.

Most parents have a rough idea of what we would like to accomplish in regards to our parenting duties and family lives on any given day or week.

Sometimes we have ideas about what we would like to see happen within the next month, by next summer or by the start of the next school year.

Parenting styles differ and teenage parenting is certainly not the same as parenting a preteen, yet all of us have some idea as to what we would like to see happen with our families and children and rough ideas of when.

And then we sometimes enter a parenting time-warp where our best laid plans are smashed against the rocks of our ever changing realities.

Parenting time-warps are as unique as the parents they affect, and yet they do exist and can cause us to question where the time goes and how we will ever get from parental point A to parental point B.

Living in a vacuum we could easily think that parental time-warps only happen to us and us alone while the rest of the parental world is charmed and not subject to this slippage of time or the derailment of plans.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, or so the saying goes. But a quick reality check assures us that parental time-warps are universal phenomena, much like the universal need for food, rest and love.

Hourglass - © Daisuke Shirako

The one truly equitable side of parental time-warps is that all of our daily hourglasses contains exactly 24 hours each day, though many days this feels like far less than it actually is.

New parents dealing with newborns, foster parents dealing with changing needs and requirements, parents of preteens dealing with daily dramas and push-backs of power; parenting is not conducive to things going according to schedule.

So the bottom line to our parenting time-warp dilemmas is ultimately how we decide to deal with them when they occur.

Just as wise parents teach their children, and especially their teenage children, that life is a long-term proposition, so we as parents need to live by this same credo and understanding.

Every seasoned parent has experience with teenagers ‘freaking out’ as teenage life is often viewed only in the here and now (“My life is over if I don’t hear from them by Friday”).

Let us as parents resist the temptation to think like teenagers when parental time-warps hit us unexpectedly.

Life does go on, and parental plans delayed can still be worked out later on as future opportunities present themselves.

This topic is near and dear to me since last month was a complete catastrophe for me and for my plans.

Last month I was hit with a parental time-warp of such magnitude that not only were my daily plans were ruined, but the weekly plans were dashed and the whole month passed me by as if I were standing still, or worse yet falling backwards.

Our disappointments in life are proportional to our dashed expectations, and last month my personal AND parental expectations were ground into chalk dust.

So what is a parent to do?

Refocus and look at the big picture.

Remember that Parenting is meant to be Fun and that even good people have rough times and wasted moments along the path of life.

Take a short rest; re-group, re-plan then start again.

Parenting is a marathon and NOT a sprint.

Good parenting can weather a few down months or side-tracked plans since the general direction of good parenting is always going in the right direction.

A great secret to success in parenting, or in anything else worth doing in life, is simply to never give up.

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