Maximum Achievement
Page 36
Kahlil Gibran, in his wonderful book The Prophet, expresses this idea beautifully. He says, “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
“You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the House of Tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children, as living arrows, are sent forth.”
CHILDREN ARE A PRECIOUS GIFT
When you look at your children as precious gifts that you can only enjoy for a short time, you see your role as a parent differently. When you celebrate and encourage the special nature and personality of your child, he or she grows like a flower in the sunshine. But if you try to get your child to be something he or she is not, your child’s spirit will wither, and his or her potential for happiness and joy will shrivel like a leaf on a tree in autumn.
The Law of Correspondence states that your outer world of relationships will mirror your inner world of thought, and your true personality. What your children are and what they become will be very much a reflection of who you are as a person. Whenever you have a problem with your child, look into yourself and ask, “What is there in me that could be causing this situation?”
Most parents blame and criticize their children when their children do something that the parent doesn’t like. However, superior parents look to themselves as the primary source of the child’s behavior. They realize that the apple never falls far from the tree.
In their earlier years, children are almost totally reactive. Their behavior, good or bad, is very much a reaction to the way they are treated by their parents and the people around them. When the parent begins to accept responsibility for the child’s behavior, real progress becomes possible in solving difficulties the child might be having.
LOVE MAKES THE DIFFERENCE
The most important consideration in raising super kids is the amount of love they receive. Children need love like flowers need water. You can never give a child too much love. A continuous flow of love and approval from the parent to the child is the child’s lifeline to emotional and physical health. Almost all problems with children can be traced to the child’s perception that he or she was not fully loved and accepted by one or both parents.
Lack of love, real or imagined, has serious consequences. Love deprivation can lead to physical or emotional illness, and even death. The damage caused by love withheld or curtailed can have a long-term, destructive effect on the personality of the child. Adults with emotional problems were invariably children whose parents didn’t love them enough.
In the early part of this century, there was a theory of child-raising that held that the less contact a child had with adults in its early months, the healthier the child would be. It was felt that exposure to too many adults would expose the child to various infections.
Based on this theory, access to newborn children was severely restricted. Infants were touched as little as possible. Parents’ visits were restricted. Aside from having their diapers changed and being given bottles, the children were left alone in their cribs as much as possible. But a terrible thing began to happen. Children being cared for in nurseries where they received very little contact refused nourishment. They became passive. They soon started to shrivel and some of them died.
This malady, “miasma,” was also called the “failure to thrive” syndrome.
These children, deprived of love and touching in the first weeks and months after birth, actually lost all desire to live. They began to die at an alarming rate.
In one orphanage in New York State, forty-eight out of fifty babies died in a six-month period. Finally, the doctors and nurses realized that the children needed warmth and contact with an adult. When the nurses began holding the children, the “miasma” began to clear up and the children began to grow normally.
In a famous case reported in one of the psychological journals, a young boy, three years old, was left with a baby-sitter while his parents went out for dinner. Tragically, the parents were both killed in an automobile accident on the way home from the restaurant. The next thing the little boy knew, he was taken out of his home by the Social Services Department and put into a foster home. He never saw his loving parents again, and he was too young to understand what had happened.
He began to act up in the foster home. He wet the bed, he cried, he got into fights with other children and became a serious behavior problem. As a result, he was moved from foster home to foster home. And a remarkable thing happened. He stopped growing. For the next four years he had problems in home after home, and at the age of seven, he was still the same physical size that he had been at the age of three.
Then something wonderful happened. A loving couple met the boy in a foster home and applied to adopt him. They took him home and began to shower him with warmth and affection. They held him, talked to him, took him for walks and drowned him with love and unconditional acceptance. They hugged him and kissed him and held his hand.
Within a few weeks, the little boy started to grow again. In the next nine months, he grew a full four years’ worth of height and weight and by the end of the first year with his new parents, he had reached the normal height and weight for his age. The powerful effect of love on children is amazing!
There are many examples of children who failed to thrive and grow physically as the result of love withheld. There are even more examples of children who fail to grow emotionally and mentally as the result of the love they needed for healthy growth being reduced or cut off when they were growing up.
These mental and emotional problems are manifested in behavioral disturbances, personality disorders, neurosis, psychosis and serious failures to cope as adults. Love deprivation is surely the most serious problem that a child can suffer during his or her formative years.
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE AND ACCEPTANCE
The key to raising super kids is to give them an unbroken flow of unconditional love and acceptance. Make it clear to your child that nothing he or she does could ever cause you to love him or her less than 100 percent. The most wonderful gift you can give your child is the absolute conviction that you love him or her completely, without reservation, no matter what he or she does and no matter what happens.
Whenever I have to discipline or correct one of my children, I always start by saying, “I love you very much, but you can’t do this, or you have to stop behaving like that.” I always make it very clear that I am unhappy with the behavior, not with the child. I have trained my children so that they understand this completely.
I used to say to my little girl, Christina, “How much does Daddy love you?” And she would stretch her hands out wide and say, “You love me this much.” I would then say, “What about when I send you to your bedroom?” She would reply, “You still love me this much,” with her arms open wide.
Then I would ask, “What about when I spank your hand or take away your toys and send you to your bedroom?”
She would then say, “’Daddy, you still love me this much,” with her hands outstretched.
I would then ask her, with mock surprise, “How can this be?” She would reply, “Daddy, no matter what I do, you always love me 100 percent.”
Dr. Ross Campbell, in his book How to Really Love Your Child, says that your child is always asking you, one way or another, “Do you love me?” The only variable is how you answer.
Sometimes the child misbehaves as a way of checking on whether you really love him or her. The older and more mature children become, the more subtle they are about how they ask the question, “Do you love me?” However, the question is always the same. The excellent parent is one who always answers this question by telling the chil
d, in every way possible, “Yes, I really love you.”
HOW TO LET THEM KNOW
If you want to raise super kids, tell them that you love them every single day. You can never say “I love you” to a child too often. Even if your child pretends that he or she doesn’t need to hear it, don’t you believe it. Every time a child hears the words “I love you” from his or her parents, the child feels more secure and confident. His or her self-esteem increases. And the more they know you love them, the freer they are to love themselves.
There are three main ways for you to tell your children you love them regularly. First, tell your children that you love them with eye contact. Children have “emotional tanks,” and they fill their “emotional tanks” by drinking in love from their parents through their eyes. Whenever you look at a child with loving eye contact, you make the child feel wonderful about himself or herself. From as early as six weeks of age, children are fascinated by looking into the eyes of someone who is smiling at them with warmth, love and affection.
Children who do not receive loving eye contact from their parents do not feel truly loved. They feel that something is wrong with them, and with their relationship with their parents. They feel insecure. They feel they have done something their parents don’t like, and they don’t know what it was.
In our society, sustained eye contact is usually accompanied by a criticism or a complaint. We fix our eyes on our children when we are angry with them, but we very seldom look intently at them just as an expression of love. Many children grow up feeling very uncomfortable with direct eye contact of any kind. They feel it is a hostile act and they look away to avoid it.
When people have just fallen in love, they sit and stare into each other’s eyes for a long time. This is a way that one adult says to another, “I love you.” You can try this with your children. You will be amazed at the impact that sustained, loving eye contact has when you give it to your children, especially if they have not experienced it for a while.
Second, you can tell your children you love them with physical contact. Hugging and kissing your children is the most wonderful way to convey to them, through touch, that you really love and value them. Virginia Satir, the family therapist, says that children require four hugs per day for survival, eight hugs per day for health and twelve hugs per day for growth. You just can’t hug and kiss them too much when they’re growing up.
Children who are not hugged and kissed by their parents eventually come to believe that they are not worthy of being hugged and kissed. They feel insecure. Their self-esteem suffers. Their personalities are affected. They react with destructive behavior.
Research shows that female children and male children are hugged about the same amount through the first year of life. After that, female children continue to receive the same amount of physical affection. But the amount of hugging that a boy receives drops off dramatically, to about 20 percent of that received by a girl by the age of five.
Some parents believe that if you give a boy too much affection, you will turn him into a “sissy.” However, exactly the opposite is true. Boys who receive lots of hugging and physical contact from their parents grow up to be strong, masculine and self-confident. Boys who receive little or no physical contact from their parents can grow up feeling insecure, unloved and lacking in self-confidence.
There is a school of thought that holds that much of the extra aggressiveness boys show when they are growing up is related to this lack of hugging and physical contact, in comparison to that received by girls. Although this idea ignores the role of testosterone in making boys more rambunctious, you can still never hurt the physical, emotional or mental development of a boy by giving him too much physical warmth in his earlier years.
Third, and perhaps the most powerful way to tell a child that you really love him or her, is focused attention. Giving focused attention requires that you spend periods of unbroken time with your son or daughter. Children need to be with their parents. They need to talk to their parents, to relate to them, to be around them while they are growing up. They need this time like they need food for healthy growth.
The debate over “quality time” versus “quantity time” misses the point. The fact is that quality time is a function of quantity time. Quality time, those precious moments and experiences that you share with your child, comes as the result of spending large quantities of time with your child. And there’s no substitute for it.
You cannot just say, “Well, let’s have some quality time.” You must be willing to invest a lot of time, perhaps many hours, if you want to enjoy the moments of “quality time” that are so important in the relationship between a parent and child.
There is probably no better way to build a high-quality relationship with your child than to schedule long unbroken periods of time with him or her. Your children need to communicate their thoughts and feelings to someone who is important to them, and you, as their parent, should be the most important person in their lives.
If their parents do not take the time to sit with them and listen, children will begin to spend more and more time with their peer groups. They will seek approval and acceptance from them, and be guided by their behavior and priorities.
The most positive influence you can exert in your teenager’s life is to be the primary source of love, support and respect for your child. If your child does not receive this love and support from you, your ability to influence your child’s behavior will begin to diminish rapidly. A gulf will grow between you. He or she will reject your advice, your values and your world view.
PRAISE AND ENCOURAGEMENT
Give your children continual praise and encouragement for the positive things they do, even small things. Praise and reinforce what you would like to see repeated. Praise them to build their self-esteem and self-confidence.
If your child comes home from school with grades ranging from A to D, compliment and praise your child on the good grades, and then encourage the child to do better in the areas where he or she is weak. Praise is like an elixir, or tonic, to the psychological health of your child. The child’s personality is formed and developed by the love and praise he or she receives from you. When you praise and encourage your child for successes, you motivate him or her to achieve even greater successes so he or she can get even more praise and encouragement.
Praising raises your child’s self-esteem and increases his or her self-respect. Praise improves your child’s self-image. Praise causes your child to believe in himself or herself, and gives your child the confidence to try even bigger and better things.
VULNERABILITY
Never use destructive criticism on your children. They are extremely vulnerable to criticism of any kind from you. It tears them up inside. They may not react visibly, but inside they hurt terribly whenever they are criticized for any reason by the important adults in their lives.
Destructive criticism has done more to destroy more personalities than all the wars in history. Most of our adult personality problems were originally caused by destructive criticism from one or both of our parents. When we in turn criticize our child, he or she feels unloved, undeserving and insecure. Our child feels rotten inside. He or she feels discouraged and depressed.
Often parents criticize their children in an attempt to increase their effectiveness. However, destructive criticism actually lowers your child’s estimate of his or her competence, his or her self-concept. As your child’s self-concept diminishes, his or her level of effectiveness decreases commensurably. Criticism of any kind can cause your child’s performance to deteriorate to the point where often he or she will avoid the activity altogether. Your child then gets worse, not better.
There is a wonderful little piece of advice by Dorothy Noltie which every parent should memorize. It is called “Children Learn What They Live,” and it goes like this:
If a child lives with criticism,
He learns to condemn.
If a child lives with hostility,
If a child lives with ridicule,
He learns to be shy.
If a child lives with shame,
He learns to feel guilty.
If a child lives with tolerance,
He learns to be patient.
If a child lives with encouragement,
He learns confidence.
If a child lives with praise,
He learns to appreciate.
If a child lives with fairness,
He learns justice.
If a child lives with security,
He learns to have faith.
If a child lives with approval,
He learns to like himself.
If a child lives with acceptance and friendship,
He learns to find love in the world.
REMEMBER TO ASK YOURSELF WHAT’S IMPORTANT
Whenever you are faced with a challenging situation involving your child, you need, more than ever, to ask the question, “What’s important here?” And the correct answer is always that raising your child with high self-esteem and self-confidence is your true aim and your real role. It is not to be right. It’s not to get the child to conform to your expectations. It’s to raise him or her happy, healthy and self-confident.
Listen to your intuition. After you have read all the books and taken all of the advice, the intuition of a loving parent is almost always superior to that of any other input. You will always know, deep inside, what is right for your child. And as long as your every decision and behavior is guided by love, you will always be doing the right thing.