Denise Schipani - Mean Moms Rule: Why Doing the Hard Stuff Now Creates Good Kids Later

Copyright 2012 by Denise Schipani

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Schipani, Denise.

Mean moms rule : why doing the hard stuff now creates good kids later / Denise Schipani.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Parenting. 2. Mother and child. 3. Motherhood. I. Title.

HQ755.8.S334 2012

306.8743--dc23

2011048314

Printed and bound in the United States of America.
VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my mother, Carol Schipani

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without my computer, since I can no longer functionally write longhand (not including shopping lists and birthday cards). I wouldnt have been able to even imagine my name on the cover of a book without my circle of fellow writers, so a first, major thanks goes to my Hos (you know your names) who get it, and give it, in a way that makes my working life infinitely smoother and smarter. Thanks to my most amazing agent, Neil Salkindfor a while there, it seemed only he and I truly believed in this book. For Shana Drehs and Deirdre Burgess, my Sourcebooks editors, a million thanks for a million changes and suggestions that made this book approximately four hundred times better than it would have been otherwise. Genius! Thanks to my parents, Frank and Carol Schipani, for, you know, raising me, and to the rest of my fabulously crazy (in the best way) and wonderful (always) family. A special note of gratitude and warm remembrance to Sister John Andre, my sixth-grade English teacher and the first person ever to call me a writer. And finally, my undying love, adoration, and admiration for My Boys: Robert, the best husband, father, and soccer coach on the face of the planet, and Daniel and James, my heart and soul.

Introduction

My name is Denise, and Im a Mean Mom.

Ive chosen a lot of things in my life, such as what college to attend and what to study, the career that suited me best, and the husband to be my partner in life. And I chose to have my children, my two sons who are, as I write this, eight-and-three-quarters and six-and-three-quarters (they tend, like many kids their age, to value precision). Also, Ive chosen to be the kind of mother I feel is best, and that kind of mother is mean.

Let me explain and hopefully in the process give you a good idea of what youre going to get from this book: Being a Mean Mom is, in my view, the surest path to creating good kids and ultimately, of course, good adults, good citizens of the world. I say mean not because Im an ice-cream-denying ogre (I am not!), or because I make my kids go work in the coal mine after the third grade (hey, thats illegal; plus, no coal mines in my area!). I define my approach as mean because its not an easy path to take all the time.

Its mean because it often bucks the prevailing parenting trend. Its mean because it often involves the use of the dreaded no word (see Chapter Six). And its mean because overall it entails taking the long view of parenting by often placing more weight on future outcomes than on present-day happiness. Its like the slow burn of a warming campfire, as opposed to the brief flare of a match.

I love my children in the natural, elemental, unspoken way that most mothers do. But just as love alone is not enough to sustain romantic attachment, its also not enough to raise decent children into independent adultsprogeny to be proud of. You need a plan. And its been my plan, from day one, to be the kind of mother who would keep her eyes on the real prize of parenthood, which is to say, the end game. The good kids.

Now, I can almost hear what youre going to say here: Isnt that what we all want? Of course it is. But its been my view that we may be going about it in the wrong way, or in a way that may produce the opposite of what we seek. We say we want our children to be happy, and happy is certainly a terrific thing to want for these children we love so much. But we forget that we cant actually make another person happy. What we can do, however, is give them the tools they need to define what happiness means to them, as well as the tools to achieve it for themselves.

So heres a sampling of what I mean by, well, mean. I carved up my philosophy into manifestos, a list of ten principles I try my best to adhere to, which Ill go into more detail with, chapter by chapter. Here they are:

1. Its not about you. Its about them. In Chapter One, Ill talk about how many of todays parents, besotted as they are with their new babies, begin to see the kids as extensions of themselves, and see their children, as they grow, as reflections of themselves. But parenting is a weird thing: its probably the most important thing youll do in your life (presuming you are not William Shakespeare or Martin Luther King Jr. or whoever, someday, finds a cure for cancer) that is not about you, at least not in the final analysis.
2. Hang on to yourself. Yeah, I knowat first glance, that seems to contradict the its not about you thing. But listen to what I have to say in Chapter Two: If you submerge your pre-kid personalityyour goals, hopes, dreams, likes, and dislikesinto parenting, youll go looking for that self later and find no ones home. Not only that, but if your aim is to raise independent children, you have to model independence yourself. I promise you, it is possible (and in my view preferable!) to raise your children without losing yourself in them. And in the end, theyll thank you for it.
3. Start as you mean to go on. In Chapter Three, its all about creating your own set of rules and principles, right from the get-go. Having a new baby is hard, but I caution you to be careful that youre not setting patterns that are hard to break later. Same thing goes for later in parenting: some things you can wing, like whats for dinner or where youll go on vacation. But if you wing it with discipline and rulesand especially if you change things up out of fear (fear of a tantrum, fear of being called mean), youre just kicking the can down the road. And dont forgetthe end of the road is your child, all grown up. Making good decisions for them now is a major way to show them how to make smart decisions for themselves