The most important and enduring relationship that you ever enter into begins when you bring a child into the world. Income, jobs, friendships, health and even marriages may come and go, but your role as a parent lasts as long as you live. The impact of your parenting can affect your child and your children’s children for generations. Parenting is probably the most profound responsibility an adult can ever take on.
No one is born with the skills of successful parenting. We all begin as amateurs. Fortunately, you can learn a lot about how to be a good and effective parent by reading and seeking advice from friends, relatives, doctors and experts in the field. There are many fine books, magazines and articles containing advice and insights that can help you tremendously in being the kind of parent that you want to be.
The most important single role of parenting is to love and nurture your children and to build in them feelings of high self-esteem and self-confidence. If you raise your children feeling terrific about themselves, if you bring them up full of eagerness to go out and take on the world, then you have fulfilled your responsibility in the highest possible sense. Conversely, if you give your child everything of a material nature but raise him or her lacking in self-confidence and self-esteem, you have failed in your primary role.
The average adult probably spends fifty years of his or her life getting over the first five. Abraham Maslow taught that we have two main types of needs that we strive to fulfill. These are the needs to fulfill our potential, our “being” needs, and the needs to compensate for our perceived deficiencies. The child raised without sufficient love tends to seek it all his or her life, rather than striving to realize his or her potential. Perhaps the kindest thing a parent can do is to give his or her child the love and emotional support the child needs to grow and thrive, creating a climate in which the child feels totally loved by the most important people in his or her life.
The growing child develops a healthy personality in direct proportion to the quality and quantity of love he or she receives. Just as a plant needs sunshine and rain, a child needs love and nurturing.
Parents want the very best for their children. They want to raise their children to be happy and healthy. Why is it then that so many children grow up feeling insufficiently loved? Why is it that parents somehow deprive their children of the love they require for healthy growth?
There are two major reasons for the failure by parents to love their children enough. First, the parents do not love themselves. Parents with low self-esteem have great difficulty giving more love to their children than they feel for themselves.
The second reason that parents don’t love their children enough is they often have the mistaken notion that their children exist to fulfill their expectations. A major cause of friction between parents and children is the parents’ feeling or perception that the children are failing to “measure up” to what the parents expect them to be or do.
Many parents look upon their children as chattel, as a form of property. They feel their children are behaving properly only when they are doing and saying what their parents want them to. If the child’s behavior differs from the parents’ expectations, the mother or father responds with criticism. Without planning to, they withdraw their love and approval from the child. They step on their child’s emotional lifeline. The child feels unloved and the foundation is laid for personality problems later in life. All negative or antisocial behavior is a cry for help, an attempt to escape the feelings of guilt, anger and resentment that begin with criticism early in life.
The starting point of raising super kids is to realize that your children are not your property. Your children belong to themselves. They are a gift to you from high above, and a temporary gift at that.
I tell my children that they have been sent to me by God, and that my job is to love them and take care of them until they grow up. I treat them as if they are precious gifts loaned to me for only a short time. My job is not to make them conform to my expectations, but to encourage them to develop their own uniqueness and individuality.
Each child is unlike any other and comes into this world with his or her own agenda, with his or her own special talents, interests and abilities. What your child can and will become, no one can possibly know until much later. The child’s job is not to conform to his or her parents’ expectations, but to grow and flower and become everything he or she is capable of becoming.
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.”
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.
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.
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 child, in every way possible, “Yes, I really love you.”
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.
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.
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,
He learns to fight.
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.
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.
Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, author of The Achieving Society, did many years of research into parenting and how parenting styles affected achievement motivation in children. He found that there were two primary characteristics of the households that produced high achievers, defined as boys and girls who began to achieve noteworthy things in their teens and early twenties.
The first characteristic of both the household and the parenting style that produced high achievers was that it was democratic. The opinions of the children were solicited and respected. The children were encouraged to give their input on family decisions from an early age. They were asked what they thought and how they felt. Their input was carefully considered. The children’s opinions weren’t necessarily acted upon in every case. But the children’s thoughts and ideas were valued. The whole family took time to discuss and agree upon matters together.
There are few things that make a child feel better than to be treated as an intelligent, thinking person by his or her parents. When you treat children as if they are important and intelligent, they will surprise you with how smart and insightful they really are.
Often around our dinner table, when I am wrestling with a problem at work, I will explain it in simple terms to Christina, who is twelve, and ask for her advice. She often comes up with remarkable insights. The old saying, “From the mouths of babes,” turns out to be very true. Children can sometimes see situations with an objectivity and clarity their parents lack. When you ask for your child’s advice in any situation, you may be surprised at the quality of the answer you get. But the most important thing is that you ask. This builds the child’s self-esteem and sense of personal worth. Asking your child for his or her opinions or advice is a sign of how much you respect him or her, and it increases his or her self-respect.
The second characteristic of parents who raise high achievers is that of “positive expectations.” High-achieving young people grow up in homes in which their parents are continually telling them how much they believe in them and how confident they are that they are going to do good work and accomplish great things with their lives.
When you say to your child, “You can do it,” or “I believe in you,” you encourage him or her to believe in himself or herself. You encourage your child to attempt more than he or she would in the absence of your words of encouragement. Children who grow up as the recipients of positive expectations always do better at everything they attempt.
Here’s an important point. Positive expectations are not the same as demands. Many parents think that they are expressing positive expectations when in fact they are simply demanding that their children perform to a particular standard. A demand is always associated with conditional love, with the idea that if the child does not perform to expectations, the love and support of the parent will be withdrawn.
It is important to convey to your children that, no matter how well or poorly they do, you love them totally and unconditionally. If the child feels that your love will be withdrawn if he or she performs poorly, your child will be nervous and insecure. Even if your child does well, he or she will get no pleasure and no lasting satisfaction from his or her success.
Parents who raise high-achieving young people have specific attitudes toward homework. They are very clear about the importance of homework and of doing well in school. They insist that their children complete their school assignments on time. In every single study, the single most important factor accounting for high scholastic achievement is the parents’ attitude toward learning and their involvement in the child’s education.
One determinant of excellent schoolwork is where and when the homework is done. In the homes that produced high achievers, the homework was done at the family dinner table before or after dinner, with the television off, and in the presence of the parents. The parents volunteered to help the children with their homework and to familiarize themselves with their children’s assignments if necessary.
Low achievers, on the other hand, came from homes in which the parents sent the children to their rooms to do their homework, if they took any interest in the homework at all. When children are sent to their rooms to do their homework, the message they receive is that the homework, and therefore the schoolwork, is not important. Children who do not learn to complete their homework by the age of ten are very seldom able to do good schoolwork later in their academic careers.
If you want your children to do their best at school, you must get totally involved in every phase of their education. As I’ve said before, life is the study of attention. You always pay more attention to that which you most value. When you pay close attention to the schoolwork and school activities of your child, he or she places a far higher value and importance on those activities. If you ignore his or her homework and schoolwork, the child gets the message that they are unimportant and tends to ignore them as well.
You can help build your child’s self-esteem by teaching him or her to say, “I like myself,” from an early age. I have them stand in front of the mirror and repeat, “I like myself, I like myself, I like myself.” Children who learn to build and maintain their own levels of self-esteem have far better self-concepts than children who do not.
Children with high, positive self-concepts do well in school. They do not engage in vandalism or get into trouble. They don’t do destructive things to their bodies. They are more capable of resisting the negative influences of their peer groups. They have stronger characters.
Children with high self-concepts, high self-esteem, are independent in their thinking. They are more likely to think for themselves, and to orient themselves toward success, achievement and personal fulfillment. They are more focused on realizing their potential than on compensating for their deficiencies.
When your child feels terrific about himself or herself, he or she develops better judgment about the things that are good for him or her in the long term. He or she develops the ability to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the future.
If you really want to raise happy, healthy, self-confident children you need to set a good example, to be a role model of the kind of person you want them to become.
Children learn largely by imitation during their formative years. They learn by watching you and listening to you and imitating your words and your behavior.
When you become a parent and set yourself up as a role model, you no longer have the luxury of doing and saying whatever you want. You have to be much more aware of your behavior and its likely impact on your children.
If you want your children to grow up with good health habits, you must set an example by eating the right foods and making the right foods available in your household. If you want your children to avoid drinking, smoking and other addictive habits, you need to set an example in your own behavior in these areas. If you want your children to spend more time reading, rather than watching television, you need to set an example by reading at every opportunity. If you want your children to develop patience, calmness, poise and self-control, you need to be a model of these qualities, even under the most trying of circumstances.
Children are always looking to their parents for cues on how to behave, and your being a good role model can have a greater influence than almost anything else you can possibly do in the lives of your children.
Probably the kindest thing that a man can do for his children is to love their mother. And probably the kindest thing that a mother can do for her children is to love their father. Children learn about love by growing up in a household in which love is freely expressed and shared. They learn how to be loving adults by observing the love between their parents.
You may have been brought up by parents who were unaware of some of these things. They may have made many mistakes with you, especially the use of destructive criticism. They may have never given you the love and affection you required.
You’re a creature of habit. Your natural tendency as a parent is to do the same things to your children that were done to you. You make the same mistakes. You do the same hurtful things and you feel badly about it. But it’s never too late. If you have slipped into the habit of using destructive criticism on your son or daughter, there is something you can do right now to remedy the situation and rebuild your child’s feeling of self-worth.
Sit down with your child, or children. Then, take a deep breath and apologize to them for all the destructive criticism, or physical punishment, that you have ever used on them. Tell them that you are sorry for everything you’ve ever said or done that hurt them or made them feel bad about themselves in any way.
One of the biggest complaints of children of all ages is that their parents never say “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” for mistakes they have made, or for hurtful things that they have said or done. Children are extremely sensitive to fairness and justice. They feel angry and hurt when they perceive that they have been treated unfairly or accused unjustly for any reason. If not resolved, this anger can last for years.
Your purpose in apologizing to your children is for you to accept complete responsibility for anything guilt producing that you have ever said or done. When you apologize, you demonstrate to your child that you are a human being. You are not perfect. You show him or her that you have the character and courage to admit that you were wrong.
Many parents refuse to apologize to their children because they fear that their children will not respect them. They feel that they have to project an image of infallibility or their children will take advantage of them. They are afraid that apologizing is a sign of weakness. Their egos are too fragile to even consider it.
However, exactly the opposite is true. When you apologize to your child, you increase his or her love and respect for you. You increase the likelihood that your child will cooperate with you in the future. When you don’t apologize when you are wrong, you make the child angry and resentful. You lower your own value in his or her eyes.
When you apologize to your child, you remove the burden of guilt, negativity and unworthiness that has built up from destructive criticism in the past. By apologizing and admitting that you were at fault for your behavior, you set your child free. The results of the simple act of apologizing, of saying, “I’m sorry for what I did and said,” can be immediate and amazing.
Many parents have seen their children transformed overnight by the simple exercise of sitting them down and saying, “I’m sorry for anything and everything that I have ever done or said that has hurt you in any way.”
Children who have been unreachable, distant and estranged from their parents for months, or even years, have been reconciled with them almost immediately when the parent has had the courage and character to accept responsibility and to apologize.
Once you have apologized, promise never to use destructive criticism again. Give your children permission to remind you when you slip from time to time. From then on, whenever you forget your promise, whenever you say something in anger, immediately take it back and say, “I’m sorry.”
Children are very resilient. They need and want their parents’ love and respect so much that they will always forgive and forget. Once you have asked a child for forgiveness, and the child forgives you, the slate is clean. The child feels liberated, like a prisoner set free. And you are free as well.
When you apologize and say you are sorry to your children, you give them permission to admit that they also make mistakes. They don’t have to invest enormous amounts of emotional energy covering up and defending themselves as most adults do. When you demonstrate that you have the courage and character to admit your mistakes, you set an example that builds courage and character in your children. They realize that they don’t have to be perfect to be acceptable. They are valuable and worthwhile just as they are.
The most enduring relationship that you will ever have is with your children. This relationship will last for as long as you live. If you treat your children with love, patience and understanding, you will reap the rewards all the days of your life.
First, the primary role of parenting is to raise children with high self-esteem and self-confidence. This sets them up for happiness and achievement as adults.
Second, children need a continuous flow of unconditional love, approval and acceptance from their parents. This is their key requirement for healthy growth. If they don’t get it, they seek it all their lives.
Third, tell your children you love them every day, in both words and actions. Give them loving eye contact, warm physical contact and focused attention. Spend lots of time with them, taking them on walks, to the movies, on trips and out on dates for lunch or dinner. Nothing tells your child more clearly how much you love him or her than your investing lots of your time in them.
Fourth, build a high-achieving environment for your children by getting involved with their education and their homework. Have positive expectations that they will do their very best. Tell them you believe in them. Value their opinions and encourage them to contribute their thoughts and feelings to the life of your family. Treat them with respect and they will respect themselves.
Fifth, remember that you are your child’s primary role model. Your child, consciously and unconsciously, throughout his or her entire life, will strive to be like you, and will treat other people the way you treat him or her. If you treat your child with kindness, patience, love, respect and approval, your child will grow up to be a fully functioning, self-actualizing human being. You can’t ask for much more than that, and you shouldn’t be satisfied with anything less.
Ask yourself what it would be like to be your own child. Put yourself in the position of your child or your children, and then evaluate yourself as a parent. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What do you do well and what do you do poorly? What are some of the things that you do that might be causing your children to grow up with lower self-esteem than you would like? What can you do, starting today, to be a better and more loving parent?
Go to your child and ask him or her if there is anything he or she feels you could do to be a better parent. Ask if there is anything you do that he or she doesn’t like. Listen attentively to his or her answers and observations. Don’t interrupt, explain or defend. Pause before replying. Question for clarification, by saying, “How do you mean?” or “For example?”
Paraphrase and feed it back in your own words. Finally, commit yourself to doing something, to acting on what he or she has told you. Words without actions are not credible.
You can become an outstanding parent by deciding to be one, and by practicing what you’ve learned in this chapter and in this book. This is perhaps the most important decision you ever make, and the one with the most wonderful payoff.