The Four Rs of Parenting. Carmen Bynoe Bovell

co-parenting is a whole other topic, and that’s a huge part of the deal. I’ve seen many persons whose relationships with their children suffered because of their relationships with their co-parents. So the advice I’d give to fathers around co-parenting is based on my own experience as a co-parent. I have an ex-wife who is the mother of my two wonderful, beautiful daughters, and then there is the previous situation with my son’s mom. We didn’t really know each other when we first met—she’s great, she’s amazing, but there was a lot of drama in the beginning. I mean, you don’t know each other to a core in the beginning, and then when you add in the stress of the pregnancy and you’re still trying to discover how you’re going to work out not only the aftereffects of parenting but this kind of situation, this pregnancy, that’s another aspect, you know.

      Richlyn Emanuel

      Parenting on a whole is not easy. You do need a village. It doesn’t matter if you’re a single parent, or if you’re co-parenting, or if the father is in the home. You need more than that; you need a village; you need outside support. You need to expose your kids to other family, other individuals, because as a parent, you don’t know it all. But we’re not born, or we don’t grow up knowing, okay, this is how you parent. It’s trial and error. It’s asking for help, asking the right questions or the wrong questions. It’s making mistakes, because I’ve done that. The one thing that I’ve tried to do as a parent is to do all the things that my parents did not do, good, bad, or indifferent. I tried to do things that parents have not done, because how I was raised and how I wanted to raise my son were totally different. His dad said that from birth, I’ve raised a well-rounded child and he was jealous. He’s actually jealous of his son because of all the things that I’ve allowed him to experience—every sport, regardless of whether or not Giovanni wanted to do it—because that’s the only way you grow, when you come outside of your comfort zone. And you do that from the inception; you expose kids to everything so they don’t have a narrow view of the world. From the time he could understand words I didn’t do the baby talk thing with Giovanni. I didn’t do goo-goo, ga-ga—none of that. I remember his pediatrician walking into the examining room one day when Giovanni was maybe two, and she said, “I thought you were having a conversation with an adult.” That was because of how I was speaking to him.

      Growing up around people and actually having conversations, I think, is very important. Exposure to the world is important; letting them know that they’re not privileged is very important. It’s also important to have a routine: Saturdays we clean house, Sundays we go to church, then we rest early to bed. Those things are important, and you can’t stray from them, because I’ve learned the hard way that once you break a routine, or you add things to a child’s routine, or there is a lot of confusion within the household, it drives your child crazy. We had a period of time in our lives when Giovanni was in the fifth or sixth grade and he went through the confusion of “this is what Mom said,” “these are Mom’s rules,” “this is what Dad says,” “this is what Nana says,” “this is what Grandma says,” and it was overwhelming because he had four adults plus school telling him what he could and could not do, what he should and should not do. So as a parent, you have to set the standard. I appreciate the fact that you think I should do things this way or that way, but you don’t bring it to the child. As a parent you need guidelines—yes, this is how other people think it should be done. That doesn’t mean that it’s right; that doesn’t mean that I’m right. I could be wrong, but be open enough to accept ideas and try different things.

      Parenting is not easy, regardless of who is in the house, and it’s especially not easy in this day and time when kids are exposed to so much, and it’s hard to limit that. But you can’t truly limit what they want; you can’t limit the influences that they get outside of the home. All you can do is set the guidelines and lead by example and have faith that when they leave your home or when they leave the house that they’re putting on their best face and showing the world how it should be.

      Yes, for me, parenting has been difficult, but I’ve had a village, and I appreciate my village. It seems small, but the amount of experience in that small village is remarkable. Giovanni has been exposed to his great-grandparents all the way down, up and down the line on both sides, everyone.

      Raymond Fisher

      Parenting is a journey that takes commitment, sacrifice, and a strong belief in shaping and molding lives to be productive. I take it as the ultimate responsibility, and being a spiritual person, I also take it as a gift. The greatest gift you can have in life is to cocreate another person and then nurture him and raise him in a positive way. For me it’s the driving force of who I am at this point in my life as an individual and as a person. The interesting thing about it is I’m coming to the point where my children don’t need that much effort on my part because of the foundation I laid early in their lives. I think it’s important that the responsibility of parenthood changes over time from less direction at age eighteen to more advice after age 21. It is ever evolving; that’s why I call it a journey. But the cornerstone of that, I think, is based on the foundation you lay with your children. The boundaries of respect, love and discipline come in many forms, and it’s an all-encompassing journey that constantly evolves.

      Martine Gordon

      My initial thought is just that it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done—the most rewarding and the hardest, simultaneously, thing I’ve ever done. For me it’s the knowledge that someone’s life and development is so heavily dependent on what you’re directly giving them at this young age. You know, my daughter is very young; it’s just the ultimate responsibility, and I really feel a lot of pressure to not mess it up. So it’s the hardest thing and simultaneously the most rewarding thing that I think I’ve ever done and I probably ever will do.

      By saying “not messing it up,” I’m thinking that I didn’t have a great childhood experience myself, and when I reflect on how I was raised, I don’t feel that I was supported and encouraged in a way that could help me get to my full potential, so I feel a lot of pressure to not repeat what I view as mistakes with my child. So for me it’s a constant, everyday sort of gut check for me… Am I acting in a way that’s demonstrating for her that she should be confident and healthy and she’s supported and safe? And you know, with everyday stressors outside of family life, some days it’s harder to do than others.

      I take my role as a parent very seriously. It’s the most important thing in my life.

      Justin Hampton

      Parenting for me is a learning process, and I try to always be open to learning new and effective ways of doing it. I’ve had the advantage of having a lot of my friends get married very young and have children very young in their early twenties, so I’ve gotten opportunities to observe them. Their children are now teenagers, and I’ve had the opportunity to see how they raise their kids, some of their successes and failures, and to see the kind of children that are the fruit of their lives and their parenting efforts. I get to see and glean from them some positive things that work and some things that didn’t work. This allowed me to kind of have an advantage. So what I try to do is just create a hodgepodge of successful techniques that I’ve seen firsthand, and I do listen to the advice of others. But like I said, I have the advantage of seeing firsthand the outcomes of their parenting; therefore, for me parenting is a learning process. It’s about trying to do your best in the moment and not be led by your emotions and to really think about what the long-term consequences or outcomes are of what you are instilling in your child.

      The way I look at it, every interaction is a learning experience for the children; every interaction is a training. Even if it’s not intentional, every conversation, every time we go to the park, I’m training them, I’m teaching them something, I’m instilling something, and it is not necessarily on purpose. For instance, they’ve gotten used to going to the park every week, and that’s something they will take to their parenting when they grow up. They’re going to remember that, and it’s going to be impactful, as those things leave a lasting impression. So I try to be cognizant of the fact that everything I’m doing has the potential to be impactful in their thinking and I just have to be really careful and intentional as much as I can about what that means and what the outcomes will possibly be for the children.

      Leticia