In my past corporate experience of “Career Mapping,” every new assignment would begin with a sit-down with a supervisor to define and understand the roles and expectations of the job. I wish someone had done that with me before I became a mother, that infamous July 4, 1998 when Danielle Elizabeth LeBleu burst onto the scene like a bottle rocket from heaven. My problem: I had no expectations and no experience with babies or children. None of my friends or siblings had them yet—it would have been instructive to have a primer on parenting before my husband and I got the ball hiked to us.
What few expectations I may have had were vague concepts like “Your life will never be the same,” or “You won’t be able to go out to dinner anymore,” or “Better get caught up on your sleep before the baby comes.” I do know this now because I have a friend who is going to become a first time parent soon—you simply cannot describe to someone how fundamentally different your life will be when you get a baby entrusted to your care. It’s similar to giving a newly married couple that sage old advice, “Marriage is hard.” You bet your bootie it is hard—and so is parenting, but it is hard in different ways for different people. That is why feedback can be so valuable: it is targeted to your precise situation.
Here are some categories that might be covered in the performance evaluation for parents:
Nutrition – While one might think this area can be left to common sense, as the adage goes, common sense is not common. When I was growing up, we had the food pyramid and that was our guiding principle. Now it is—something else. Really just the food pyramid turned upside down, I think. What’s all so confusing to me is the number of servings per day per fruit, vegetable, grain, or protein. I don’t know if it is George Bush math, but there seems to be a great deal of servings that have to be administered daily in order to be “balanced.” And, it should all be in the constraints of less than (fill in the blank number) calories per day. Then there is the challenge of trying to meet these nutritional needs while in the car on the way to swim or baseball practice or work. One needs a knowledge-based algorithm to figure out all the combinations of how to go wrong here. In addition to that is the “short-order cook” phenomenon. Very few families today sit down to the dinner table together during the week. This breeds a whole world of issues about catering menus to children’s tastes, rather than a balanced portfolio of different kinds of offerings. It would be instrumental to have some feedback in this area.
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