It has been a long time since I recommended books on my website, and to compensate, I will recommend three at once! This is because I am not just recommending the books, but their author—Jesper Juul, the Danish family therapist and author of numerous books on parent-child relationships and upbringing. His most famous work is The Competent Child, the popularity of which is evidenced by its translation into 18 languages. Two of his other wonderful books are Man & Father and Here I Am! Who Are You?.
These recommendations will be most interesting and useful for those interested in the topic of parenting, but this subject relates to something much deeper than what it seems at first glance—communication between parents and children. It is, in fact, about how we can communicate meaningfully with everyone, including ourselves.
I have heard more than once from my clients that after learning techniques for better communication with their children, they began applying them to their partners. Their amazement was great when they saw that these techniques had the exact same positive effect. Of course they would—meaningful communication is based on the same principles! And our children, due to their dependence and unconditional love for us, have the greatest ability to nudge us to learn something new and to change.
In the complex parent-child relationship, it is not always clear who is the teacher. The only certainty is that children imitate what they see, not what they hear. The smaller the gap between our words and our deeds, the mentally healthier the children we can raise. If we advise children to do something that we ourselves do not apply in our lives, they will not listen. Therefore, the most valuable legacy we can give them is our personal example. This is where the great difficulty lies.
We solve this by treating ourselves and our own needs with the same degree of respect and understanding as we do the needs of our child. Because inside us, there also lives a small child. This is our emotional body. Like our external child, it also needs someone to see it and care for it. In other words, to be a parent means to be a parent to at least two children—to your “inner child” and your “outer child.” The challenge is how to reconcile their different desires and needs.
In this regard, Jesper Juul’s books are invaluable; they contain guidance on how to build healthy boundaries between us and others, between us and our children.
“Being loved is a strictly individual feeling for both young and old, but one thing holds true for everyone—we do not feel loved when someone violates or disregards our personal boundaries. If this happens repeatedly and harshly, our self-respect diminishes, and with it, our ability to act constructively. We can neither care for ourselves properly nor improve contact with the person violating our boundaries. This applies to children as well as adults.
It takes time to get to know our personal boundaries. Some we feel intuitively, but others we only realize after many years, and we also need time to learn how to express them in a way that is understandable to others.
Yet another paradox of life is that we realize our personal boundaries only when someone crosses them. Similarly, we realize the existence of someone else’s boundaries only after we collide with them or unintentionally violate them…
Thanks to children, parents have the precious opportunity to get to know their own boundaries and change them so that they are as constructive as possible for both parties. The same happens in a romantic relationship between two adults. The only difference between an adult partner and a child is that the child has much less experience. In any case, it takes about ten years to get to know our boundaries.
The better we know our boundaries and the more personal the way we express them, the greater our satisfaction in communicating with others—and their satisfaction in communicating with us.
Daily interaction between parents and children is filled with such strong and vulnerable love that in the mutual learning process called family life, someone risks violating the other’s boundaries at any moment. Guilt is minimized, and self-respect is maximized, when adults take the leading role and ‘set the tone.’” — Jesper Juul, Here I Am! Who Are You?
With gratitude to Mira—a mother who is constantly learning from her child! It was from her that I learned about the books of this wonderful author, and the quote above also came first through her.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The Jesper Juul excerpt is translated from the Bulgarian version of the text provided.
