Is Normal really nothing more than a town in Illinois??
This is a quote from the start of a new post today in the CPO Insider blog:
“I’d like to congratulate our dedicated Child & Family Therapist, Sara Dimmerman on the release of her first book, Am I a Normal Parent?, the definitive guide to figuring out what’s normal for parents in the 21st century.”
There’s a quiz you can take here and after taking the quiz, I really had to sit back and think a bit. I posted my comment to that blog but I’ll put it here again because I think that some of it really bears repeating and thinking about …
Wow, some really thought-provoking questions there.
The difference between LOVING your child(ren) and LIKING them … luckily both of my boys seem to be developing into wonder, caring human beings (although some days I sure question the “human beings” bit!!) and even though they are radically different, I really do like them both (most of the time).
“Be there in a minute” (or ten?) - that’s another hard one - we are pulled in so many different directions at once and we’re trying so hard to multi-task, that getting side-tracked or being “rushed off your feet” is a common ailment. No wonder when I tell them that they only have a few minutes left of video game time they take 1/2 hour or more … they’ve learned to “stretch” time from me … arrgh!!
I’ve often thought that Normal is nothing more than a town in Illinois … and this seems to underline that. I’ll watch for your book in the local stores/library - I think it will make a very interesting read!!
As I commented above, there were some questions in that quiz that really made me think. Do I LIKE my children as well as love them? When I say “I’ll be there in a minute” and it takes 10 minutes - did I really mean to say “Give me 10 or 15 minutes” or did I really mean 1 minute and I just got sidetracked? My husband will tell you that I have no idea about “mornings from hell” (because I leave the house at 5 am every day to go to work…), but he could probably write a book about those kind of mornings!!
This is a really great subject for Sara to have written about - so many of us have found CPO in the first place because we were looking for reassurances about our parenting - and really those assurances are mostly about “normal”, aren’t they?
There really IS a town in Illinois called “Normal” … it’s southwest of Chicago and where the Illinois State University is located. But is “Normal” more than that? To paraphrase a bit, is one person’s “normal” just another person’s “weird”? I really don’t think that there is just one state of “normal”. What’s normal in my home may not be normal for other families homes.. So how does that allow us to define normal if it’s different for everyone??
