top 3 uncle tips
25 Nov 2021a couple weekends ago i went on a hike in the blue hills with two friends of mine, jenny and grant. while chilling at the top of great blue hill, jenny asked for my top three uncle tips. i thought about it for a bit and came up with these. i’m sharing them here as a continued commitment to working out loud but i want to name that these are not things i do perfectly. they’re just things that i’d recommend any uncle start with on their uncling journey.
1. learn how to hold babies
many of us learn bad lessons about babies. some of those include confusing lessons about their fragility. of course, in some ways, yes babies are fragile and need to be handled with care. but power of the image of not holding a baby’s head properly and their neck breaking is WAY outsized, imho. this image, combined with lots of other toxic messaging about who gets to hold babies, who is good at it, how strength correlates negatively to ability to hold babies, how quickly you should give a baby back to a parent if crying happens, etc etc i know made me feel like i couldn’t even ask to hold people’s babies for a long time. at some point, i had the fortune of being close enough to some friends who just asked me all the time if i wanted to hold their babies. and i got better at it. but i also had to ask and still have to ask questions. how does your baby like to be held? has that changed since the last time i saw them? what are do’s and don’t’s for you when someone else is holding them? it’s work, for sure, but i truly believe there are few things more transformative for men than the first time a baby falls asleep in your arms.
2. remember gift and responsibility of the uncle role
being an uncle means you have a very particular relationship to those who call you uncle or who you call nibblings. it means you have a relationship with the child as well as the parents. you can see that neither has the ability to. that means you can say things, to both parties that neither can. partly beacuse of your perspective and partly because you’re not enmeshed in the same way. remember that. remember the responsibility and gift of it. it’s a powerful role. i would even argue it’s a necessary role.
3. hold space to do your own work
…because you will absolutely be confronted with yourself and your own shaping when you uncle. as i participate in raising/parenting kids in my life, all sorts of stuff comes up. for example: eating. is👏🏾a👏🏾whole👏🏾thing👏🏾! watching my parent-friends learn how to teach their kids about food brings up my own history with food in my family and then interacts with how i am with the nibbling and their food as well as how i relate to my nibblings’ parents. my ability to be clear about how i was raised, what lessons (good, bad, or neutral) i learned, how i feel about those lessons now as an adult knowing what i know, and more all support how i can be a healthy part of that learning journey for us all. this is true for basically everything in parenting/uncling. because, imho, most of parenting can be boiled down to this: teaching new human how to human. and so the more space i have to get clear about my own practices of being human (fully human, not warped/oppressed/repressed/minimized human), the more i can offer when i’m present.
ok, one caveat i want to make just to be clear: i am writing about uncling because, as a cis-male, intentionality around raising children is almost non-existent. but this is due to the genderfucked world we live in. the things i’m discussing are (probably) not actually constrained by gender identity. i’m writing from this perspective and for the audience of uncles because that’s where i see a gap. much (but not all) of what i write is probably true across many genders. but as css and like every writing teacher ever have taught me: knowing your audience and writing to them specifically tends to, ironically, have the greatest possibility for creating more broad applicability.
phew! that’s what i got for now! ciao.
words / writing / post-processing
847w / 22min / min