Baltimore's Child Magazine - February 2008 Interview with Joanne Giza
Local publishing house, Sidran Institute Press, recently released 27 Secrets to Raising Amazing Children by local author Molly Brown Koch. Interviewing Molly was like taking to an old friend - not because at 80 Molly is old. Anything but! But because the give and take came from a place of respect, the kind of respect we hope we share with our true friends.
For decades ow Molly has led and continues to lead a variety of parenting groups that have included mothers in public and private schools, mothers returning to society following incarceration,, and mothers parenting in situations where there had been domestic violence. [More recently, she has added parents of inner city school children.] Out of those groups, Molly has learned the keys to successful parenting.
"You see," says Molly, "I came to my groups not to teach, but to listen and to learn. My role as I saw it was to help parents find their own answers within themselves. The diversity of their backgrounds, history, customs, experiences, and feelings and the ways in which they dealt with the trials and tribulations of parenting as well as its joys and satisfactions gave me a wide-lens picture of what it means to be a parent. The parents who were already raising amazing children taught me what it takes to succeed, and I pass their secrets along . . ."
I thank the reader who asked me to write a column about stay-at-home moms. It gives me an opportunity to present what I believe are some common misconceptions.
Mothers who choose to stay home for the explicit purpose of devoting themselves to raising their children deserve recognition.
What do you think about sacrifice as a value to teach your children? If you think about the many ways you have sacrificed for your children, from the minute they were born, (probably even before) think too, how it made you feel. Exhausted? Resentful? Noble? In pregnancy, we sacrifice comfort for morning nausea, heartburn, pressure, backache for the sake of having a child. We sacrifice sleep to feed the baby, we sacrifice real rest by sleeping with an ear tuned to the baby’s cry. Did you feel a sense of “selflessness” in giving of yourself to your children by meeting their needs before your own?
Every parent's heart breaks at the news of any child's molestation and fills us with fear for our own children. Pictures of abducted children appear on our television screens and we snap right into action by warning our children (for the umpteenth time) about stranger-danger. We give the usual instructions: don't help a man who seems so nice find his lost puppy, don't take candy from a stranger, don't talk to anyone you don't know.
The miracle of change never ceases to amaze me. I’m not talking about the seasons, though they are certainly worthy of mention. No, I am talking about the miracle of change in people. In our KEEP THE CONNECTION WORKSHOPS℠, we find that most parents, grandparents, and other caregivers are raising their children the way their parents raised them.
What quality could be more important for your children's lives than to have the ability to bounce back from the troubles they will encounter? What do you need to know to make them resilient? Are some babies born with a natural ability to bounce back from their struggles and need no help from their parents, or do all children need help in becoming resilient? Child psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry claims that "some children are born with a high threshold for tolerating distress while other children are born with an extreme sensitivity to any stimulation and are easily overwhelmed." "But," he adds, "no matter what temperament, the capacity to deal with stressors is shaped by the child's caregivers." (Emphasis mine.)
In every home you will find people, from young to old, with different temperaments, different ideas, different tastes, different sensitivities, different ways of looking at the world. And despite their differences they are expected to not only live together but get along. How will that happen? What will bring each of these diverse personalities into a communal spirit? What will make these unique individuals a family and a strong one at that?
In America, in November, we take a collective and personal inventory of our blessings and celebrate them with our families around dining room tables laden with delectable foods. Some of us, with our children in tow, go to shelters to share our bounty with less fortunate people. Or we make contributions to social service agencies. We Americans are a generous people. We give from the heart.
As summer fades into fall, we’re faced with resuming our winter schedules. There are those among us who are the well-organized managers of daily living. For them, life runs like a well-oiled machine. Never ruffled or upset, (well, hardly ever,) they move smoothly from one task to another with time to spare. Even if they gave us their handbook on time management, most of the rest of us would soon return to our customary chaos of trying to get anywhere on time, fully dressed and fed.
When my friend, Laura, a retired teacher, told me she used to start her classes with joke-telling, I was puzzled. The jokes didn’t even have to be funny for everyone to laugh, she said, because they were all instructed to laugh anyway. In fact, not getting the joke was in itself funny – and the infectious laugh of thirty kids had the classroom in an uproar. She didn’t say how long the hilarity lasted, but she did say that when they couldn’t laugh any longer, they were ready to get down to work.
Have you ever wondered why June was the most frequently the month of choice for weddings? (I say “was” because wedding trackers report that August now outranks June in popularity.) I found two explanations (or myths) for June’s favored status. The first claims that the ancient Romans married in June as a tribute to Juno, their goddess of marriage. The second has a socially practical, and as you will see, a necessary purpose. It is believed that in the 1500s and 1600s people took their annual bath in the month of June, that made June the most bearable time for social events, or any other kind of event, for that matter.
