Hellobee

I often think of parenting in terms of how it compares to raising and training animals, specifically horses. I know that kids are not equivalent to animals, and that there are significant differences in the process. The comparison tends to offend parents, but hear me out. I have spent my entire adult career and most of my teenage years studying the behavior, training and care of horses. I was a professional horse trainer and now run a nonprofit where we teach underprivileged children to ride and work with horses.

Our best lesson horse having a chat with a very small rider.

When I’m raising and training a young horse, a few things are critically important. Consistency, kindness, and clarity are the basic principles behind any quality training method. You must be consistent, as horses make up in memory what they may lack in intelligence. Horses remember everything and they easily get confused and frustrated if your training methods are inconsistent. Horses aren’t naturally the most trusting animals to work with. They’re not like dogs that will forgive and often forget a raised voice and even worse transgressions. Horses are flight animals, and if they are trained through fear, they will never perform as well as if trained through kindness to develop trust. Clarity is important. Even if your request is very simple it needs to be black and white, otherwise the horse will get confused and stop listening all together. I believe all of these principles apply to good parenting, whether foster parenting or parenting biological children, as well.

While the main principles are consistent across quality training methods, I think it is critical to keep in mind that the idea of one size fits all doesn’t work in training (or parenting). It is a mistake, and often a trainer’s downfall, to become so focused on one training method that they fail to see when it doesn’t work with a certain horse. I’ve seen trainers ruin horses by being so stubborn that they miss all of the signs that the horse doesn’t understand what they are trying to teach. Horses have individual “personalities” that are just as diverse as those of people. We must keep this in mind and approach each as an individual with different needs.

I believe this will be an important point for me to remember when I become a foster/adoptive parent. Just because one thing worked with the last foster child doesn’t mean it will work with the next. Just because in my mind I have an idea of how things should go, what methods I’d like to use and what the outcomes might be, doesn’t mean the child will follow what I read in that textbook, blog or website. I am a planner. I love to know what is going to happen and to have a concrete plan going into a new project. This whole parenting thing is a little scary for me because I can make all the plans in the world, but I know that when push comes to shove, I really have no control over what will work and what won’t.

Kindness goes a long way in gaining trust.

I have ideas about what might work with foster babies. I have ideas about how that might be different than what I would like to do if I had biological children. I’ve read books about attachment disorders, books about adoption and more blogs than I can keep track of about foster parenting. I’ve been very busy making plans, gathering information, researching everything I can think of. Only time will tell how useful all of the research will be when it comes to actually parenting. I’m sure glad I have all of you for support when the time comes!