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Home › Articles › Parenting Strategies › Weeds and Blooms

Weeds and Blooms

The Similarities Between
Gardening and Parenting

By Amy Dingmann

Pages:  1  2  3  4  

Don't Compare Your Garden to Others
The performance of what we care for is often cause for competition. In gardening, it's easy to wonder why our neighbor's petunias aren't drooping like ours or why their bean plants are tall and green when ours have barely sprouted.

This happens in parenting, too. We're quick to compare how our children stack up to others around them. However, it may be helpful to realize we aren't all working within the same situation. Just as plants, soil or tools can vary between gardeners, families deal with different things. Children's personalities, abilities and situations all set them apart from each other.

"As a teacher I always knew that no two kids are the same and each may need different help along the way to fully bloom," Johnson says. "But once I became a parent, I saw this was a new distinction. Kids are all coming with a different make up and personality. They each need guidance and help to become responsible adults, but that may look different with each child. There is no cookie cutter approach to raising kids. You just keep trying different things until something works and then you look back and see the growth."

Everyone Has Advice on Gardening
Ask any gardener for advice on how to grow a specific plant, and they're likely to talk your ear off about what worked for them. Everyone has an opinion on how to grow something better than how someone else has chosen to do it.

Sound like parenting? From the moment a woman announces she's expecting, the advice starts in and never stops.


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