Have you had a job interview lately? In preparation for the interview have you looked one more time at your academic qualifications listed on your CV and visualized your previous work experience in order to remind yourself how best you fit in the role you are applying for?

I am sure you have, and as a result appeared confident at the interview, had a clear understanding of the job description and felt ready to start the new job. Of course, it is only human to experience some nervousness and stressful anticipation when we change jobs and workplace ( we are the ‘new kids on the block’ after all ), but we somehow appear to ride over our fears poised by the confidence of our previous knowledge – especially when our academic record is of a true high score-. Our confidence is also boosted by our previous successful experience in the area of business or industry where we already have achieved excellent results, hence the climbing up the hierarchy ladder, larger salary, more benefits, respect and recognition by our peers! It is a nice life…

Now, dear friends, try to apply the above mentioned scenario to parenting! Perhaps the most challenging and demanding job in the world, perhaps the one job that most of us are faced with at some point in our life and we have to do it without any qualifications, no previous work experience, no understanding of the job description, because there is none…basically no clue at all!…other than the maternal instinct and a few books here and there that we try to read in just 9 months’ time…oh! I forgot that some of us attend prenatal classes, maybe once-twice a week again over a period of 9 months!

Needless to say, we don’t get paid for this job, it is an -all- hours- open- shop- and we hardly get any recognition from our peers. On the other hand, there is the biggest perk of them all – the hug, the kiss, the unconditional love that we receive from little creatures who look at us in total awe! For this and this alone, it is all worth it again and again! But is there a ‘catch’ somewhere in this wonderful love story?

Based on this very elementary preparatory background mothers of the world are expected to give birth and raise the leaders, athletes, academics, farmers, workers, executives, doctors, lawyers, accountants and so on of the future, while for any other less important job we are required to go to university, technical college or some kind of certified educational institution for at least 3 years before we are awarded with any degree that allows us to enter the business world at just basic trainee level.

Now, please, tell me…where is the logic in that? Why do we somehow assume that raising a human being with all its complexity ( which only further down the line becomes apparent ) is the simplest thing in the world, requires no training, no qualifications and that somehow it will come to us naturally? Why has our society always assumed that raising a healthy well rounded individual is an  automated process?

Can you recall the first day you brought your first baby back home from the hospital? The nervousness that you felt on the first day in a new job has no comparison to the sheer fear for survival that you experienced as you were trying to change the diaper alone and not drop ‘the real new kid on the block’ from the changing table!!

Let’s assume for argument’s sake, that somehow what the midwives during the prenatal classes so nicely describe as the ‘maternal instinct’ does kick in during these moments of sheer panic mode and we survive and learn the mechanics of diaper changing, breast feeding, food preparation, sleep training patterns and so on…but is our ‘maternal instinct’ truly alert when it comes to passing on values and principles to our boys in our effort to help them build healthy personalities? or are we just too exhausted from keeping up with the mechanics of the every day struggle of our steep learning curve that we start cutting corners on our sons’ psychological development, their emotional balance, their heart and soul education? Are we hoping that somehow they will figure this process out by themselves, just like we did?

Please, mothers with boys, let’s not just stop there! We all know that our daily parenting tasks together with our other workloads are of mountainous proportions, but let’s just go the extra mile and make some more time to help our boys think different, behave better and hopefully bring on a change in the world we are living in…let’s not watch the men of the future ‘grow by chance’!…

…and one last request please… Could someone make Parenting a subject to be studied at university? I dream of the day that all of us (women and men) will be attending at least a 2 year course before the first ultra-sound gives us the butterflies in the stomach 🙂

Respectfully yours,

Diana Z