How to raise balanced children

My Theme for 2011 is ‘balance’ – so my intention is to focus on how we can find a balance in all aspects of our lives and raise our children to do the same. In order to achieve the ultimate balance we need to give each aspect equal priority: our ‘Physical Health’, ‘Emotional Health’, ‘Mental Health’ and ‘Spiritual Health’ all of which need to be taken care of on a daily basis. My first blog for the year will address the importance of emotional health, it’s foundations and relevance to raising healthy well balanced children.

Out of all the challenges I’ve had to face in my life, I would say that Parenting has been one of my toughest and probably one of the most important to get right. What I have come to learn however, is that I’m not always going to get it right. And in fact, I’ll probably get it wrong more often than right. The truth is that I am, and every single parent out there is going to make mistakes, so my advice is to relax, forgive yourself and use every set back as an opportunity to learn and better yourself. We need to go easy on ourselves… ‘Guilt’ is the only emotion that does not have an ‘upside’ and will only lead to more destructive unhealthy behaviour.

Most importantly, before we try to help children, we need to help ourselves so that we can model healthy behaviour. To have the greatest influence on children and help them, the change needs to begin with us, the parents and educators. If we are not doing what we are saying or teaching, then we are teaching our children something else.

In order to help ourselves and our children, we need to firstly understand our inner child. We all have an inner child which is developed during our formative years and NEVER leaves us. If this Inner Child is nurtured in a healthy and well-balanced way, then as adults we will have an inner child that ‘SERVES’ us, enabling us to live happy and abundant lives. However, if our Inner Child is raised with extremes like…

* Too many ‘shoulds’ and/or ‘should nots’

* With very few boundaries

* With severe punishments for breaking ‘the rules’

* With too much praise, attention and importance on achievements, appearance and performance

* With disapproval around expressing feelings or emotions, desires, wants and fears

* Or is taught to ‘PLEASE’ others rather than be HONEST about what’s REALLY going on for them…

… then our behaviour will reflect this and it will be difficult for us to live an authentic and balanced life.

In the above situation, we are likely to develop an Inner Child that comes from FEAR and we’ll then go through life constantly protecting this fearful inner child. We will also learn to hide and suppress parts of ourselves that are essential for living a balanced and happy life, while developing other parts of ourselves that dominate our entire existence… these selves are often known as our ‘PRIMARY SELVES’. On the other hand, our ‘hidden selves’ will stay buried as they are the ones that were disapproved of, or firmly disciplined as we were growing up. We can often identify our hidden selves by observing our judgments and criticisms of others… when we see these qualities in others, it is likely that we’ll judge them because we haven’t learned to accept them in ourselves. So ultimately they are our issues, not others.

Here’s an example of what might happen if you raise a child to be very polite, conform, please others, obey and follow all the rules to the ‘T’ and to be 100% honest no matter what… This child will likely become an adult with an Inner Child that is terrified of ‘doing something wrong’, of ‘being criticized’, of ‘not being liked and approved of’, of ‘hurting other people’s feelings’ and of ‘telling a little white lie or even keeping information to themselves’.

So the opposing qualities, like; ‘being a little bit selfish’, of ‘setting boundaries and saying NO’, of ‘being flexible with rules’, of ‘not being responsible for other people’s reactions and feelings’, of ‘creating their own way of being in the world’ and feeling okay about ‘stuffing up’ and ‘making mistakes’ will be suppressed, pushed-down and denied .

There are many possible outcomes if you suppress your natural human qualities… you may judge others for having these qualities, you might be attracted to someone who has these qualities, you could rebel later in life and create the extreme of these qualities in your life, you may become depressed and so on… But the absolute end result of suppressing and denying any of the ‘selves’, which are essential and ‘natural’ to the state of being human, will be PAIN and SUFFERING!

Our Inner Child needs to have permission to experience to some extent all qualities of life… selfishness and selflessness, laziness and pro-activeness, obedience and rebellion and so on, in order to become a well-balanced healthy happy adult.

How to raise a child to have a balanced approach to life!

Let children know that there is ‘a Time and Place for everything!” This way, children can experience all their ‘human’ qualities without feeling ashamed or guilty for any of them.

Here are some suggestions:

• If you want to be lazy and there’s no school or scheduled activities, then that’s OK. In fact, you can rephrase the world ‘lazy’ and say “It’s okay to relax and do nothing sometimes.”
• If you want to scream, then go outside and find a place where you won’t hurt someone’s ear drums… (:
• If you want to let some aggression out then find a pillow, a boxing bag or something that you can punch without hurting yourself or others, OR have a wrestle with dad.
• If you want to feel sad and cry, then go to your room and have a good sob…
• If you want to keep some things just for yourself and not share them, then do so, but make it clear to anybody who may need to know this.
• If you don’t like a rule, then say so… encourage your children to participate in making the rules and allow them to say how they feel about them. It’s a good idea to occasionally be flexible with the rules to show your child that rules can be changed sometimes!

The bottom line is this; our behaviour, beliefs, perceptions, emotions and attitudes influence children in more ways than one, because kids observe their parents to gather information about the world, which includes how to react to it and feel.  A child begins to learn about the world by reading a parent’s face and uses the parent’s body language as a reference point. If they see a happy face, they know that what they are doing or whatever is happening is okay. If they see a fearful face, they learn that something is scary, bad or not okay. So if you have a lot of stress in your life and are unhappy &/or have suppressed emotions for example, your child will learn behavioural patterns that reflect this resulting in an unhealthy emotional state. Therefore, to really help your kids, you need to help yourself first by accepting and expressing all aspect of yourself… your human nature!