Our children are like seeds, seeds with life waiting to express itself. They only need the right environment, not a manual to grow to their full potential. But what if the environment turns toxic, the water is too much, the air is poisonous, and warmth is too little. What will happen to the seed? Will it thrive even if, it is handed a manual of how to grow the best…. this is the plight of children today.
10-20% of children and adolescents today are suffering from mental disorders. Half of all mental illnesses begin by the age of 14 and ¾ by mid-20. If untreated they extend into adult life affecting their education, employment, relationships and even parenting (WHO). So, are these statistics not enough to shake us out of our slumber and start talking about what is going wrong? Start talking about the starting point itself… our parenting. Here we can majorly make three observations.
Firstly, we think we are doing our best. We are providing not only all that our kids need but much more than what they need. So our job is done. It’s only our children who have to work harder to grow up into fine humans
Secondly, we follow the “fix what is wrong” approach to make our children good. So our focus is always on correcting what is wrong to make our children happy and good. As you know, “what we focus on grows”, no wonder our challenges seem to only grow over time when our focus is only on correcting. The process is so counterproductive that it eventually robs our children of their basic entitlement to feeling good about themselves and one which creates single narrative individuals. It is always painful to hear a child say, “I am no good”, or “I am a bad child”. What story have we given to this child, how does he feel limited by this and how do we then expect him to behave?
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Raising children is more than fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.
Martin Seligman’s
Thirdly and most importantly, although all parenting resources seem to focus on the children, little or no focus is laid on the people who are responsible for raising them. Their parents, teachers and other caregivers. There is no or little attempt to identify and address the well-being challenges they may have, their preparedness to be emotional coaches for their children.
Convincing data show that lack of parents’ attention or ability (due to their own stress and strain) to provide a psychologically and emotionally healthy environment for children and adolescents and lack of good relationships exposes children to emotional deficiencies and psychological and behavioural problems. Studies also show that one of the causes of mental harm is the nature of parent-child interaction. Many pathological patterns and their characteristics are acquired through interaction with the family.
You can’t give what you don’t have, you can’t teach what you don’t know yourself…so, you have to fill your pockets with what you desire to give to your children. So, happy and fulfilled parents make the ideal role models. For a child to be happy, parents must also be happy, to help a child explore his strengths, parents must also be aware of their own strengths, to teach a child to be optimistic; a parent must also have a hopeful view of the future.
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“The best Way to make the children good is to make them happy”
Oscar Wilde
So, an ideal place to start will be to look within. Bringing healing and happiness in your life will not only bring joy in your kid’s life but also help you deal with the challenges your children may have with confidence and ease (Studies have proven that happier people do better in the face of challenges). Here this is especially urged to mothers to create a Maa’s movement (a mass movement of mothers to bring joy and happiness in their lives), to care about their wellbeing rather than living by the values that our culture holds, of self-sacrifice and self-neglect.
Mother’s well-being is of paramount importance as she is the first looking glass of a child. She is a weaver of the child’s earliest experiences that are deeply embedded in the child’s subconscious and operate as an operating system in later life too. Early maternal, paternal or other child risks can put the child in a negative trajectory and promoting positive mothering and fathering behaviours may help embark the child on the joyous fulfilling journey. In wide experience of counselling, it is found that in many cases, involving people with emotional, and psychosocial challenges, there may be a mother who may be anxious, depressed, stressed, a father, who is emotionally detached, authoritative, obsessive, depressed, ill and the list goes on.
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There is something in the family that, even if has not caused the disease may have contributed to its growth. The sad part is that most of us fall on the ‘not happy-not depressed’ position in a continuum of happiness and depression and we are ok with it, as we don’t even think that authentic happiness is attainable. A happy mother (and then a happy father and a happy teacher) is not an added advantage but a prerequisite in bringing happy, emotionally robust and purposeful human beings. Once we have achieved that, we are equipped to “connect and not correct” them. Then we shift from the position of authority as a provider to a facilitator. The parent-child connection is the strongest protection the child has. And through this connection, we listen and share and help the child feel safe and hopeful.
Lastly due diligence needs to be paid to the language we use with them. Because words have power, power to become thoughts and then experiences. How does words, ‘failure, lazy, stupid’ makes us feel? Words, which we sweepingly use in our interaction with our children, justifying that we don’t mean it, or we just say it to motivate them. Have we ever been motivated this way and why say it when we don’t mean it?
Anyways out of more than 60,000 words we have in our dictionary, we end up using not more than 3500-4000 in our life time. So, at least choose them wisely for your children. The words are weaving stories in their mind, stories which they identify with…so give those empowered narratives to live by, and eventually you have contributed your bit to the society by bringing a positive individual.
So, it is hoped to make an attempt at raising positive parents because “Your children will become what you are, so become what you want them to be……”
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