Children provide us all with the opportunity for growth and self-awareness. Perhaps nothing will challenge us more than fully giving ourselves to another like we do to our own children and will cause us more pain as we see ourselves – our weaknesses, our strengths, our potential, and our shortcomings – in our children every day of our lives, especially as our children grow older into young adults. Additionally, we realize the great burdens that we carry in overcoming any negative imprinting generated in our own childhoods from our own parents or other parental figures. In parenthood we are inexplicably – yet cosmically – dragged into recreating all of these negative imprints that so plagued us as children ourselves.
So what can we do to free ourselves of these bonds and to free our children of these bonds – to break the karmic circle? Conscious effort and equanimity. Parenthood is the perfect vehicle for many of us to complete our development as humans which requires both conscious effort and equanimity. Conscious effort because human nature is to avoid that which is difficult, be it physical, emotional, or psychic work. Equanimity because so much is beyond our control as humans in this intricate, beautiful, unpredictable world.
In my own efforts to overcome these bonds I have focused on six key principles: Trust, Touch, Laughter, Expansive Mindset, Being Present, and Letting Go.
Trust: I have an agreement with all of my children: If they do anything wrong or make a mistake and they tell me about it then they will not be punished. Implicitly I am communicating to my children that I both trust their judgment and understand that they will make mistakes. I am also teaching them that making mistakes is a part of growing … we all make mistakes and have lapses in judgment … but we need to take responsibility for our actions and our mistakes not cover them up. This teaches children and young adults confidence, trust, and more importantly maturity. Maturity is the ability to learn from your mistakes and grow from them without being defensive. There a countless other side benefits from this: it encourages openness and sharing of experiences, it provides teaching moments, it prepares children for adulthood, and it shows love.
Touch: I believe that we need to touch, hold, snuggle, and tickle our children as much as possible especially when they are young but even when they get older. There is no more fundamental way to show our love and affection for another person than touching, kissing, and hugging them with sincerity and all of our being. As adults this sometimes appears superficial, but with children it is instrumental in the development of their self-confidence and self-love. A sincere hug is the ultimate demonstration of unconditional love – the physical contact and two hearts being so close together is a profoundly special experience – and one that is unfortunately rarer and rarer as leave childhood. How sad for all of us adults. Human beings are meant to be close and loving … it creates energy, passion, strength, caring, and community.
Laughter: Laughter heals all wounds and energizes our very being. It relieves stress in adults and well constructed humor builds verbal and abstract intelligence.
I never, however, use sarcasm, cynicism, or poke fun at others in humour. I personally believe that such remarks only leave a negative impression no matter how playful they are intended to be. Building on “touch”, tickling is one of the most wonderful ways to generate laughter in children, but use it very carefully. It can be a very intense experience… for one of my children anything more than 3-5 seconds is overwhelming for him.
Expansive Mindset: This is perhaps the most critical of all six principles. Metaphysically our thoughts dictate our self-perception, our experiences, and our reality. Underlying every negative experience, you will find a negative thought. No person was ever great, who saw themselves as less than capable or worthy as a human being. You cannot have success if you do not believe that you can be successful. It would surprise me if most people did not realize this to be a fundamental truism in life. BUT I believe that most people do not realize that this thought energy can be transfered to other people. This is one reason why sometimes when I am developing a new idea I am reluctant to share it with others, because I do not want the negative, skeptical judgements of others to interfere with the incubation of the idea. How many times have you been told that you can’t do something only to have it come true?
Unfortunately, our children’s minds are even more receptive than our own and they pick up on all kinds of cues, both verbal and non-verbal. This is why it is so critical to have completely open, expansive mindsets for our children. Most healthy children truly can become whatever they want to become. I believe that they are limited more by negative, limiting unconscious imprinting than they are by the boundaries of their innate potential.
This has very profound implications for parents: for one, we have to let go of all our own baggage in order to let our children be as great as they can be. So many adults are so unhappy, disappointed, or self-limiting (perhaps from their own parents imprinting) that they limit those around them by projecting negative, limiting beliefs (consciously and unconsciously). Do you have an expansive mindset when you think of your children? When you speak to your children? When you talk to others about your children?
I truly realized how profound this was when one of my children did something that truly disappointed me. He was very young and he harmed a small animal. My wife and I were really shaken by the experience and as it turned out, after a professional opinion, we were convinced that he was too young to realize what he was doing and that it was completely innocent. But before we were comforted by that expert insight I found myself creating a judgment of our child that was very negative and limiting. I actually felt my physical being, my cellular structure, shifting. I started to view him as a mean, unloving, hurtful child and I felt the shift inside of me. And I was struggling to return to the expansive mindset of him that I had before this event: intelligent, loving, curious, and happy. In fact, it even affected how I spoke to him and touched him. I had an incredibly profound realization that children pick up on these cues, both the conscious and unconscious ones. And of course, as parents how we treat our children is completely consistent with our views of them. But I realized in that moment that children, more likely than not, live up to our expectations of them: be they great or small.
Being Present: In the same way that our children are impacted my our unconscious mindset they are impacted by whether or not we are truly present and available to them. For children, especially but not only younger ones, there is no tomorrow. Too often as adults we forestall our pleasure until tomorrow because we are distracted by something more important. As adults we can understand or rationalize these events (although it becomes unhealthy if we postpone happiness, fun, and living too long). But children do not understand this, although that they know is that they are being ignored at worst or feel alone at best. This has a direct impact on their sense of being loved, important, and their self-confidence. Similar to the metaphysical impact of the expansiveness of our mindset our children also respond to the conscious and unconscious cues of how present we are when we are with them. Being present is like sunlight…it is critical to the full, healthy growth and development of our children. A couple of cloudy days are fine, but constant cloud cover limits the full development of our children. Although I personally have a career that is very demanding of me during the week, I have made it a priority not to work on the weekends and to spend that time with my children and my wife and to be as present as possible during that time. I believe that quality is much more important than quantity if you are not present and emotionally available.
Letting Go: Our children are not perfect, we are not perfect. If we follow all of the first five principles we really cannot be disappointed with whatever life brings to us and to our children. Not all of our children will be rocket scientists, doctors, authors, popular, athletes, or even happy. Life will bring them what life will bring them and everything will be perfect exactly as it is. Do not judge yourself or your parenting and do not tie your ego into how well or how poorly your children do. Keep the bragging to yourself and do not beat yourself up (or children up) over their shortcomings. Life is perfect exactly at it is. Life creates the exact experiences that we need, and that our children need, for the evolution and development of their being in this lifetime. For some it will be easy and for others it will be hard. It will be what it will be and if we adhere to the first five principles then we cannot and should blame ourselves.
Nor should we expect our children to live “up to” our judgements and priorities. So many parents have expectations that their children will be athletes, or the smartest, or the most popular. Let go and let your children be. Let them be what they are meant to be, not what you were meant to be or what you believe they should be.
Similarly, I know too many parents who allow them selves to be drawn into their adult children’s lives because they cannot let go (in another sense of the phrase). But as much as they want to help their children, they are only enabling dysfunctional behaviors. Adult children have to be responsible for their selves. Let go and do not enable these behaviors.
Everything is perfect exactly as it is. It couldn’t be anything but perfect, because we are who we are at this very moment. How could it be anything else? The entire world, the entire history of humankind, our forefathers, our families, our parents, our everything has brought us to this exact moment exactly as we are. How could it be anything but perfect?
Namaste.
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