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What a Primary Parent DOESN’T Need
When a couple discerns which of them should stay
home with their children, there are personality
traits that seem like they would be useful for the
Primary Parent to have but aren’t really that
important. At the very least, they can be learned,
more or less. The first of these is time
management. For any organization to be successful,
from a big corporation to a family, it must have a
certain level of efficiency. Whoever stay at home
should have a grasp on scheduling or at least have
a basic grasp of time, right? Not necessarily.
How will Baby be fed if Dad can’t create
and stick to a schedule? He’ll eat when he
makes the kind of noise that tells Dad he is
hungry. How will the kids get to school or soccer
practice if Dad is so overwhelmed by the clock that
no one gets anywhere on time? Well, they’ll be
late, usually.
There is a certain amount of embarrassment
involved in sneaking into church or class or
practice quietly so no one notices, but for the
most part, there isn’t any great damage done.
A really late Dad might accidentally teach his time
deficient ways to his children who will propagate
this dysfunction, but by the time it becomes a real
problem, they will have moved out and be on their
own.
Another trait that a good parent should have but
doesn’t need right away is cleanliness. This
isn’t personal hygiene; it’s the ability
to keep a house clean when there are forces at work
determined to create chaos and clutter. Clean is a
relative term, of course. If Dad leaves the
leftover Chinese food containers on the living room
floor so long the mice have made homes in them,
maybe he should pass the baton of Primary Parenting
to Mom. If he has trouble keeping the playroom from
being a minefield of toys for a week, leave him
alone. At least the kids are happy! Besides,
cleanliness, it turns out, is a learned skill.
My sister-in-law is a self-proclaimed neat
freak. She is one of those people who can sense
when the potted plant is in the wrong place on the
shelf and MUST fix it immediately. I , on the other
hand, have always been a bit lax in the tidiness
arena. In high school, I was the founder and
president of the Society for the Lovers of Being
Sloppy (SLOBS). It was more to be the founder and
president of something, but you get the idea.
By the time my sister-in-law’s first son
was born, we had four kids and I had learned that
children were messy. Happy kids are even messier.
(I know that because whenever I tried to make my
kids clean up, they usually ended up crying.) I was
interested in how my sister-in-law would react when
she came to that same conclusion. Would she fight
harder and become even more neurotic about
cleaning? Would she give up and relax, letting the
house get untidy occasionally?
Know what I discovered? I really can’t
stand having a messy house. I don’t think
I’m neurotic yet, but I can’t imagine
it’s far off. I spend so much time tidying now
that when the house is actually clean, I’m
uncomfortable because I know, I just know there is
something else to clean somewhere. I still
don’t like cleaning, I just like it to be
clean. Is that so bizarre? This is proof positive
that being tidy is a learned skill and that it will
force itself on anyone who takes the reins of
managing a home fulltime.
More than any other job, parenting is on-the-job
training. Whoever gets to be the
Stay-At-Home-Parent doesn’t need to be clean
or on time or even the better cook, but he or she
better be willing to learn. Unless the family
really likes leftover Chinese food.
©2008, Mark
Phillips
* * *
Women, it's true, make human beings, but
only men can make men. - Margaret Mead
Mark
Phillips is a Stay-At-Home-Dad and freelance
writer. Along with raising his four children, he is
developing a franchise called “The Vacuum IS a
Power Tool.” It is designed to help SAHDs
maintain that which makes us men, instead of hairy
Mom-substitutes. He earned a B.S. in
Communication/Theatre Arts and teaching
certificates in English, public speaking, and
psychology from Eastern Michigan University. After
six years as a high school English teacher and
Director of Dramatic Arts at Powers Catholic High
School in Flint, Michigan, he changed careers and
became a Stay-At-Home-Dad. www.TheVacuumIsAPowerTool.com
or E-Mail
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