Scraps Of Wisdom

I myself am convinced, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge and competent to instruct one another.

—Romans 15:14

When Henry and I spent a weekend in California with my college girlfriends and their babies, the conversations were so rich. In the same way that we helped each other figure out how to get the babies to sleep, and all threw in our opinions about a good marinade for skirt steak, we offered one another our stories and bits of advice, the scraps of wisdom and experience we’ve gathered up around ourselves along the way. We’re not therapists or child development experts, but we’re giving everything we can to our families, and really, the challenges are pretty similar. The solutions are, too: we found that almost every one of the rough spots we discussed under the trees could use an extra round of listening, a liberal dose of forgiveness, and a solid effort at empathy.

We talked, of course, a lot about parenting. A large part of parenting comes down to observing your actual little person, and shuffling through acres of advice to select the piece that meets your little one’s need just perfectly. It all comes down to close observation, willingness to take advice, ability to try something new when all the old things have stopped working.