Contrary to the popular saying, “seeing is believing,” when it comes to raising capable, happy, healthy children, the opposite is true. Believing is seeing!
Helping Our Kids Succeed
This means that we actually create the best chances for our children to be successful by believing that they want to and CAN make good choices. No matter how low a child stoops, their ability to start fresh and make new decisions strongly rests on how much their parents believe they CAN!
It is important to recognize that we have a strong ability to influence our children’s choices. For example, take a child who is struggling to respect his teachers. The phone calls don’t stop coming from the school. One day this child just sat in class without opening any books, the next day he said “no” straight to the teacher’s face when she told him it’s time to line up, and now you are even being called into school for a meeting with the principals.
Stop Negative Thinking
If you allow your mind to go into autopilot thinking, you may start to think, “He is such a disrespectful child! What will he grow up to be? Who will want to marry him? Will any high school accept him? Maybe he has some kind of diagnosis that stops him from being able to listen.” It’s not a problem to have these unhelpful thoughts, but if you begin to engage with them as if they are 100 percent reality, and believe that your son’s future is set by these beliefs, you are locking your child into a very dismal place. Know that whatever we believe about a child is what the child believes about him or herself. So, if your vibe and overall emotion is, “My child’s poor behaviors define him,” you will come across distressed and he will actually believe that he is a disrespectful boy. That belief causes him to continue being disrespectful.
However, if you believe instead the universal truth that “every moment is a new fresh moment, and a person’s past behaviors have nothing to do with today,” you can open up huge doors for better choices in your child’s life. I am not saying that it’s not upsetting or frustrating when our children act in certain ways, but if we expect bumps as part of our parenting journey, it will help us guide our children to be who their souls really want them to be. After all, isn’t it quite ridiculous of us to wonder why our children make poor choices sometimes? It’s part of the human experience, and our children are no different than we are in that way.
Struggles Are Uniquely Designed Opportunities
Furthermore, to shed some light on your misbehaving child’s true abilities, whatever a person struggles with tells us that they have the ability to be the exact opposite. That’s right. A person’s struggles are uniquely designed as opportunities to overcome them. So, a person who presents as very greedy has the ability to be extremely generous. A person who presents as mean and hurtful has inside them the ability for extreme compassion. This applies to all negative character traits. And the trick is for YOU as the parent to be the one to believe that, even before you see it.
So now imagine the same scenario of a child who has been very disrespectful in school. Each time you get a call, you see the real pure child beneath the misbehaviors, thank the teacher or principal for the call, and then interact with your child without worries about his future. After all, nobody knows the future, so why invest any energy worrying about it? Your child feels your love, accepts your limits, and starts to make changes to behave more respectfully, as a reflection of his real self. Sometimes the miracle happens right away. Sometimes what is required is lots and lots of our steadfast belief in this child, and knowing that no matter how badly he messed up until now, he is capable of doing what’s right.
Continue to believe in every child until you see!