Below I share the most important things I know from my own experience about how to be good parents to our children. And, as is usually the case for me, I look for the spiritual dimension of this profoundly important role in our lives.<\/p>\n
One of the main questions that concerns the parents I meet through my professional work is how to protect their child from the mistakes they make. The problem arises when the child does \u201cwrong things\u201d (or fails to do the \u201cright things,\u201d which is essentially the same), and the parents cannot make them stop, because the child resists all their well-intentioned advice, explanations, and warnings. Instead, the child continues in a direction that makes the parents feel powerless, angry, and anxious that something bad is happening\u2014or will happen\u2014to their child, and they do not know how to protect them.<\/p>\n
The desire to spare our children the pain and suffering that follow from mistakes is understandable. But is this actually possible? Are not mistakes the very way we learn, through our own experience, to walk new paths independently\u2014by falling, getting up, and thus maturing through the inevitable limitations and difficulties of life?<\/p>\n
To want to protect our children from pain and suffering is to want to protect them from the wholeness of life itself. Of course, there are situations that require our firm intervention and prohibition, but the situations discussed here are not of that kind. They concern those life experiences we must go through in order to mature, even when they hurt. When we are in the position of the parent in such situations, the best thing we can do for our children is to help them learn from their experience. This means speaking to them as to adults and discussing their experiences by asking questions, offering hypotheses, and sharing our own experience\u2014guided by an attitude of respect and trust in their ability to cope on their own.<\/p>\n
When we respect their right to make choices and to learn from their mistakes, they will respond to us with respect as well. And if they do make a mistake, they will be more open to discussing it and sharing it with us. Shifting our attitude from \u201cHow can I protect my child from mistakes?\u201d<\/em> to \u201cHow can I help my child learn from their mistakes?\u201d<\/em> opens the door to creativity and an exploratory spirit, and supports their confidence that even if something difficult or painful happens to them, they will be able to cope\u2014and even grow\u2014from the experience.<\/p>\n Once, on a deeper level, we truly accept that we cannot forbid our children their inherent right to learn from their own experience\u2014including negative experience\u2014we have taken the first step toward becoming wise guides in their process of growing up. The second step is to clarify what exactly we want for them, because a so-called \u201cmistake\u201d is merely an experience that did not lead to the desired result. And in the many conversations I have had with parents, that desired result usually turns out to be nothing other than the various forms of success in life.<\/p>\n At first, this is success at school and making friends; later, success in professional realization and starting a family. If I continue asking questions, we usually arrive at the understanding that what they truly want most is for their child to be happy, regardless of the specific form this happiness takes. And this greatly changes our understanding of success.<\/p>\n In his book The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents<\/span><\/span><\/strong>, Deepak Chopra<\/span><\/span><\/strong> begins by defining what success is:<\/p>\n \u201cMany people uncritically accept that success is essentially material and is measured in money, prestige, or possessions. These things certainly have their importance, but possessing them is no guarantee of success. The success we want our children to achieve can be defined in nonmaterial terms, and not in a single way. The definition should include the ability to love and to feel compassion, the capacity to experience joy and to share it with others, the confidence that comes from knowing that life has meaning, and finally, a sense of communion with the creative force of the universe. All of these together constitute the spiritual dimension of success, a dimension that brings inner fulfillment.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u2014 Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success<\/em>, pp. 113\u2013114<\/p>\n Another author, the founder of the family constellations method, Bert Hellinger<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/a>, also offers his definition of success:<\/p>\n \u201cWhat is the greatest success for humanity? Everything that serves peace and love. These are spiritual successes that overcome division between people and nations. This too has its price. Among the prerequisites for this level of success is parting with our ideas of good and evil, of chosen and rejected, of higher and lower. And at the center of this lies the farewell to images of God that give fixed meaning and importance to such distinctions. These successes are humble and human. They are the successes of love\u2014the success of all-embracing love. They bring paradise back to earth. They carry the promise of the deepest happiness, a happiness shared with many, a happiness open to everyone.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u2014 Bert Hellinger, Orders of Success<\/em><\/p>\n Being clear about what we truly want for our children places our relationship with them on a solid foundation. In moments of conflict, it reminds us that the only thing separating us is the different way we believe they will find happiness and harmony in their lives. And if we are wise enough, we will admit that we cannot be certain what that way is\u2014not only because we are different, but also because even if we know what is good and what is evil, we do not know what is for<\/em> the good and what is for<\/em> the evil. The saying \u201cThe road to hell is paved with good intentions\u201d<\/em> applies in full force to our relationships with our children.<\/p>\n Therefore, if we want to have influence over our children, it is good to begin with humility. At first glance this may seem paradoxical, but only at first glance. If we continue further, we will see that without humility we cannot feel genuine respect for their destiny, nor can we embody the wisdom through which we help them learn from their own experience. Humility reminds us of the limitations of our own perspective at moments when we impose it unquestioningly as the only correct one. It also helps us redirect our gaze toward ourselves\u2014the only place over which we truly have influence.<\/p>\n This is the most important lesson of parenting: the best way to be wise guides for our children is to embody in our own lives what we wish to see in them. Another way of saying the same thing is that we can influence our children only through personal example, not through advice.<\/p>\n Imagine a mother whose daughter is struggling at school, allows other children to dominate her, and cannot stand up for herself. The mother becomes anxious when she sees other children bossing her daughter around, while the girl complies and does everything she can to be liked. The mother insistently advises her to stop doing this and not to neglect herself. The problem is that the mother behaves in exactly the same way at her workplace\u2014she makes compromises that hurt her dignity, but out of fear of rejection she continues to make them. How is the daughter supposed to listen to a parent who does not live what she advises?<\/p>\n Therefore, if we want to be able to influence our children, it is important to know that the source of influence lies in our integrity\u2014not in what we say, but in what we do; in how we feel and what we radiate from the deepest core of our being. It is actually a good thing that our children do not want to listen to advice that we ourselves do not live by.<\/p>\n This leads us to the next important characteristic of the \u201cschool for parents\u201d: the teacher\u2013student relationship in this school is reciprocal. This means that our children can learn from us only to the extent that we ourselves are open to learning from them. In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People<\/em>, Stephen Covey<\/span><\/span><\/strong> writes that \u201cto have influence, you must be open to being influenced.\u201d<\/em> This principle of mutual influence lies at the heart of the fifth habit, which he calls \u201cSeek first to understand, then to be understood.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Thus, communication with our children can turn into an endless, mutually enriching process of learning if we maintain an open and receptive attitude toward life and are aware that change happens from the inside out<\/em>. Only then does the reversal occur\u2014our children sense this and begin to seek our advice willingly. They want to follow us in the things that make them respect and value us.<\/p>\n The mother who has difficulty standing up for herself at work needs to develop self-respect and the strength to set clear boundaries when others take advantage of her. When she succeeds in doing this, that message will reach her daughter even if she does not say a single word or give a single piece of advice. Moreover, children who behave submissively at school often compensate for this behavior by becoming authoritarian and domineering at home. If the mother develops self-respect, she will not allow her daughter to \u201cwalk all over her,\u201d and thus she will provide a living example of what it means to stand up for oneself, to set clear boundaries, and not to allow oneself to be exploited.<\/p>\n Being a role model is the best gift parents can give their children\u2014and the most difficult one. We do this by giving our inner child<\/em> the inner parent<\/em> we ourselves needed when we were young. This means many things, but at its core lies the quality of unconditional love. When we manage to develop and express it toward ourselves, it naturally begins to express itself in our relationships with others, including our children.<\/p>\n When I was a young mother, the theory of child-rearing associated with Benjamin Spock<\/span><\/span><\/strong> was in vogue. It is now outdated; today the fashionable approach is attachment parenting<\/em><\/a>, associated with William Sears<\/span><\/span><\/strong>. In place of rigid and strict prescriptions about how to care for babies, a theory has emerged that is in many ways its complete opposite. This is the idea of intuitive parenting and spontaneous responsiveness to a child\u2019s emotional needs, according to which the parent is the primary authority in determining what is right in this very intimate process of relationship.<\/p>\n I like this theory very much because it represents a step toward higher levels of psychological health, but I have already observed how it, too, is beginning to be treated as a dogma. This is the problem\u2014when theories about life become more important than life itself, and instead of trying to understand life in its complexity and uniqueness, we try to force it into a theory about it.<\/p>\n I have a client who was a strong proponent of natural feeding, but at a certain point she became ill. After medical examinations, it was determined that the cause was physical exhaustion resulting from an excessively long period of breastfeeding. I also know a woman who feels deeply guilty because she had to give birth via caesarean section rather than through the natural birth canal. She had been advised that babies born in this \u201cunnatural way\u201d have a poorer start in life. I also know another mother who, after six months of devotedly responding to her crying infant, eventually collapsed from emotional exhaustion and began searching for alternative books (theories) on how to handle the situation.<\/p>\n These are theories\u2014maps of reality that change and are updated as new facts accumulate. At best, they approximate certain aspects of reality, but they can never become the whole of that reality. The theory of natural parenting is a wonderful theory which, when taken to an extreme, becomes deeply unnatural. One of its main arguments is that this is how children were raised in primitive tribes, where they grow up more confident, calm, and happy. But the psyche of a mother in a primitive tribe and the psyche of a modern mother are profoundly different.<\/p>\n Attachment parenting is based on trust in the mother\u2019s intuitive understanding of the child\u2014but intuition functions only when there is a healthy connection to oneself and one\u2019s instincts. Unfortunately, the connection of the modern woman to her instincts is severely wounded (see Women Who Run with the Wolves<\/em> by Clarissa Pinkola Est\u00e9s<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/a>).<\/p>\n I remember how I felt when my daughter was a small baby and I had to make decisions for her. I tried to sense what the right action was, but I could not, because I encountered a dense layer of fear. If at that moment I had relied solely on what my instincts were telling me, I would have been constantly confused and anxious. It took me many years to restore trust in my own sense of what is \u201cright and wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n As Clarissa Est\u00e9s writes, \u201cWild animals and the Wild Woman are endangered species. In the past, the feminine nature was plundered, oppressed, and forcibly altered. For several thousand years it has been devastated like the wilderness, banished to the remotest corners of the female psyche.\u201d<\/em> The Wild Woman is that innermost instinctual part of the mother\u2019s psyche that knows<\/em> beyond words. The great difficulty is not in following her; the great challenge is restoring our connection with her. Once that connection is restored, following becomes easy.<\/p>\n And so we arrive at the next very important factor that interferes with a full and healthy parent\u2013child relationship. In the time we live in, awareness of the exceptionally important role of the parent in a child\u2019s upbringing and development is steadily increasing. The problem is that this, too, begins to lead to one-sidedness and extremes, leaving us with the oppressive feeling that our children\u2019s fate depends entirely on us as parents\u2014that if we fail to meet their emotional needs in the \u201cright\u201d way, we will traumatize them, and thus our most precious beings will suffer for the rest of their lives because of our parental mistakes.<\/p>\n To see ourselves in this way is to think of ourselves as God. And it also means to be blind to the facts.<\/p>\n Many remarkable individuals have had childhoods that were \u201cseverely traumatized,\u201d yet this did not prevent them from becoming a source of inspiration for others. Children born into the same family can have such different characters and temperaments that, from the outside, it seems as if the only thing they have in common are their parents. The book The Soul\u2019s Code<\/span><\/span><\/strong> is full of such examples, illustrating that trauma itself often lies at the very core of what shapes our individuality and creative potential.<\/p>\nWhat Do We Actually Want for Our Children?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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The Only Place from Which We Can Influence Our Children<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Theories of Parenting Change Over Time\u2014and So Do We<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Innate Images<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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