Parenting: The Paradox of Presence and Planning
The gift of presence — of being fully emotionally present, in the moment, with another human being — has been on my mind a lot lately. As a therapist, it’s a huge part of what I bring to my work with clients. Presence is a powerful influence that can facilitate healing, growth, and increased awareness in others. Naturally, as a parent, I want to bring presence into my relationship with my young son. But bringing presence into parenthood is challenging: it can seem both effortless and impossible. Paradoxically, being with my young son can create a transcendental moment in which I feel I’m right there with him, at the very same time that I can’t avoid being a total mind-traveling, multitasking momma — which can keep me locked in my head and distracted, when all I want to be is fully embodied in the present moment, but which also allows me to be the logistics juggler who ensure his freedom to just be.
Both of these experiences were at play this morning. My son and I spent a lot of the early morning in bed, naming different objects in the room together. I was completely absorbed in this experience and absolutely enchanted. But the spell was broken when he started getting fussy, and I deduced it was getting close to breakfast time, and if we didn’t end this play and eat soon, I’d have a “teen wolf” toddler on my hands. So I continued to play, but my multitasking-momma self started to run the show. I scanned my memory for what food we had in the fridge for breakfast and continued to ponder what needed to be put on the grocery list, as a loose sketch of the day began to take shape in my mind. Meanwhile, my son didn’t notice I was laying out my to-dos in my mind; he was focused on playing with his toes and totally in the moment. Again, paradoxically, it can be challenging to juggle logistics and time travel between future plans and a needy toddler, but without it, I don’t know how either of us could relax into just being.
Presence as a parent is critical to the healthy development of your child — and in my case, my toddler. Kids need our attention for many things. Presence serves an important function in their brain development and also helps them regulate their emotions. Kids know they matter, are loved, and are valued because we are present with them. Presence plays a significant role in the development of a healthy sense of self and in forming secure attachment. It also keeps little ones safe at a time when they have not yet developed the ability to navigate danger; make big decisions about their safety and well-being; and tend to their basic needs, such as eating and sleep. And without presence, we cannot be attuned to them as they grow and change constantly. Parenting requires us to be continually present, joining and meeting kids where they are, because they change so rapidly, especially when they are very young. In a young child’s world, joy can become despair in a second, so we need to be present as our kids begin to understand themselves and find themselves within all their big emotions and life experiences. Simply put, our presence helps them make meaning out of their life experiences and find their own worldview.
And it can be a two-way street. If we allow them to, kids can deliver us from whatever mind trip we may be tripping on and bring us straight into the present moment. I can’t count the number of times I was caught up in a thought, future planning, or reliving of a past experience, when my son did something that brought me, feet planted, into the present moment. Since kids are in a perpetual state of nowness, they can powerfully bring us right into that same state. It’s a gift that kids give us: total nowness and presence in our very adult and distracted lives. These moments feel transcendental to me. I lose myself, my worries, my hopes, my everything to the moment. In these moments, I am in a state of total beingness, as if nothing else exists in the universe. It’s incredible. I believe every parent knows these moments. It’s the moment when your child calls your attention to the wonder of living, and you allow yourself to enter that awestruck state again. One of my favorite teachers, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, teaches that “Children are the soul naked.” They are just that, and we can become equally soulful in their presence.
But their perpetual nowness isn’t free. Parents create the container in which they can just be. Kids don’t know this, and their nowness doesn’t depend on this, of course. Yet it is a critical part of their development to be here, now. Their ability to conceptualize a future and to make decisions to reach a desired outcome is not fully formed in their brains until they reach full development as the ripe age of 25. I’m struck by all the behind-the-scenes stuff parents do to create an environment where kids can thrive.
As a parent, you probably have experienced the huge mental load that comes with running a household with kids. There are endless lists to make, cross off, and remake. We plan meals, naps, activities, lessons, and adventures. We make sure our kids’ clothes fit and are weather appropriate. We stay aware of the status of all the necessary supplies and pack accordingly for daily travel. We store in our mind schedules, calendars, needs, wants, and all those running lists for our children. It takes an incredible about of managerial and administrative work to be a parent, and to be success at it, we need to think and plan and look for creative solutions all during the never-ending task of parenthood. All this mental busy work snatches us from the present moment. Parents watch their kids and plan mealtime. Parents read stories while doing time calculations in their heads about when to do bath time and how to occupy one kid while they dress another — all while trying to remember how much screen time which kid has already had that day. And for working parents, there is the added load of juggling job-related responsibilities.
The paradox I see in presence and parenting is that parenting necessitates both preoccupied planning time and deep presence, even when those might seem mutually exclusive. Both experiences are valuable and worthy of respect. But for some reason it’s hard for us to integrate both. Some parents I talk to resent or feel guilty about the management side of parenting. This can be because of an unbalance in their partnership, overwhelm about their responsibility and workload, or an attainable ideal of perfect parenthood. It can also be because the parenting culture doesn’t celebrate the planning part as much as the presence part. Regardless of why it’s hard to integrate both presence and planning, I believe that is important work for us to do as parents. Presence is beautiful gift to children, and so is creating a container for kids to be safe and totally present in the now. Parents do both and deserve mad props for both. The ability to be totally present with kids and be the elves that do all the behind-the-scenes stuff to make the household run like a well-oiled machine are equal parts of great parenting. It’s a lot to hold — deep presence and thoughtful orchestrating — and parents deserve so much recognition and celebration for this ongoing, no-days-off gig of our lives.
