THE PERFECT GIFT FOR A CHILD

The most important and enduring relationship that you ever enter into begins when you bring a child into the world. Income, 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 undertake.

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 a lot and seeking advice from friends, doctors and experts in the field. There are many fine books and magazines containing advice and insights that can help you tremendously.

The true role of parenting

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 full of eagerness to go out and take 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-esteem, you have failed in your primary responsibility.

Maximum achievement

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 fulfil. These are the needs to fulfil 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 live, rather than striving to realise true potential. Perhaps the kindest thing a parent can do is to give the child the love and emotional support needed 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 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 parents don't love

There are two major reasons for the failure by parents to love their 
children enough. Parents with low self-esteem have difficulty giving more love to their children than they feel for themselves. The second reason is that they often have the mistaken notion that their children exist to fulfil their expectation. A major cause of friction between parents and children is the parent's perception that the children are failing to measure up to their expectations. Many parents look upon their children as a form of property. They feel children are behaving properly only when doing and saying as their parents want. If the child's behaviour differs from this, the mother or father respond with criticism. Without planning to they withdraw their love and approval. They step on the child's lifeline. The child feels unloved and the foundation is laid for personality problems later in life. All negative or antisocial behaviour is a cry for help, an attempt to escape the feelings of guilt, anger and resentment that begins with criticism early in life.

Children are not property

The starting point of raising super kids is to realise that they are not 
your property. They belong to themselves. They are a gift to you from on high, 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 special 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 with his or her own agenda, talents, interest and abilities. What your child can and will become, no one can possibly know until much later.

Kahlil Gibran, in his wonderful book 'The Prophet' expresses this idea beautifully. '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 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'

Extracts from Brian Tracey 'Maximum Achievement'

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