The job of parenting

I had a conversation with one of the people I call my bosses (she technically isn't, but the structure at work isn't important, and also very confusing). We got into a discussion about how I need a better job, but no one has called me for an interview since before my husband got a job, he got hired in March, and started in April. This is frustrating because I literally live from one paycheck to another paycheck with NO wiggle room at all. By literally I mean I hadn't deposited my paycheck from this past week yet and had about $2.00 in my bank account and was having issues trying to order my new glasses. She mentioned my resume and how I perhaps need to change it up a bit. I told her there are only so many ways to spread out and professionally say that I'm a glorified baby sitter. I monitor youth, make sure they are behaving and eat. Then try to get them to do things like clean the house and clean themselves. That's basically what happens on a typical shift, it really is. She said there's more to it than that, and said something about am I just baby sitting my own kids. First off, I don't have my own kids, and sometimes I really want them, and sometimes I feel that it would be a terrible idea. Before this job I was always sure that I wanted at least one someday.

I was at Walmart trying to do my grocery shopping for the week so I had a bit of time to think about it. I did decide to look at what I had down for my resume and see if I could alter anything, or add other points. I went and added quite a bit of things that I hadn't put in before. Then, as I was starting this paragraph I remembered one that I meant to put down and forgot about. However, it still sounds to me like I'm just adding more levels to being a glorified baby sitter, maybe I've moved up to nanny instead of baby sitter. As I mentioned in a previous post I do sometimes try to provide life lessons, and am terrible at it. I'm trying to get a bit better about at least stopping the word flow once I get going. I sort of put that on my resume as "life skills". I also put how we are trying to teach them appropriate interactions with others. None of these kids play well with others, a big part of why most of them are there. When I ran out of things to put, I still wanted to put more. The problem was I don't know what else to put. I was trying to think of writing it as describing the job duties of a parent (as she said, there's more to it than watching the kids).

What does a parent do beyond monitoring, transporting, and teaching life skills? Life skills is also being used to mean basic tasks like cleaning, cooking, and laundry. A parent is supposed to offer their child things to do that the child likes to do. Since many of the things that the youth in the group home like to do are not accepted by society as a whole we have issues doing that, or because part of the job is created a structured environment for behavioral modification (another thing to add to the resume, better sounding than med administration). I did include that we try to teach responsibility for individual actions and ensuring that the consequences are appropriate to the actions. I made sure to put in there that consequences are positive or negative. These consequences are were we try our hardest to change behaviors.  A parent is responsible for teaching appropriate behaviors in the first place so I don't have to try latter and do it.

These kids don't view me as a parent, nor do they view any of the staff that way as far as I can tell. They view us more as jailers, at best we are nothing more than baby sitters to them. So my argument, while not professional, and far from how we are supposed to view ourselves, so in the end we were both right, but from different sides of the coin. We are trying so hard to change these kids into something that society will accept that most of the time it fails.

The truth of the matter is I'm burned out from this job, have been for most of a year now, but I'm stuck. Mainly because I don't want to be unemployed. This boss has never seen me at my best, when I actually believed in the system that I was trying to work with, when I thought that the kids in the group home were there because they wanted to change. Most of them are there because there's no where for them to go and they want to be anywhere but where they are. Everything we do to try to get them to do the things they need to do to leave (because that's also our goal, we don't want them there forever) they just get angry and upset with us. It's saddening, and frustrating because they don't seem to understand that just because their behavior isn't necessarily illegal that it's still not right.

This reminds me of a lesson I learned really pretty awkwardly in about the 1st grade. It's not acceptable to lick people in public (even if your pretending to be a dog because your 6 and it's recess). It's not illegal to lick people in public, it's just weird and makes people uncomfortable. This means that society rejects it in the norms, not in the law. Norms are also important and one of the things that the group home kids don't get very well. Norms dictate our interactions with others, so that is also covered in a neat concise package on my resume. It's also part of a parent's job to teach norms as they are teaching what society accepts and doesn't accept.

This is the job of a parent, and in my more ungracious moments I can tell myself that I'm a fool and an idiot for thinking I can do it. However, these are kids who aren't quite right in their judgments, and I'm viewed as nothing more than a baby sitter. At least part of that is because I'm really too young to be given the respect I should be having from them. Maybe they view me as the big sister, but I don't know. The best I can do is model the behavior that we are trying to get these kids to use, but I'm not very good at it. However, no one else is very good at it either, so at least I'm in good company.