How many times do parents wish their children would “listen” to them – at least once a day, okay so maybe once a week or in while? Why is this so big in the parents agenda? Don’t we want our children to have their own agenda and we simply create a space for them ensuring all the safeties are taken care of? Or is our child’s independence too much a threat to our need to either feel needed or feel grandiose as parents.
When a toddler hits it is likely to have happened after he tried getting your attention perhaps for connection or to let you know something. You were too busy in your head space failed to see the cue and when he whacked a pan on the floor, that got your attention. Instant reaction to that is to scold the toddler. A conscious response to that is to get down on your knees, and listen. Ask the toddler what happened. And see how this unfolds.
We have issues with our children because we have issues.
We want to have our children but let somebody else parent them. We are the parents in name only. Let them go to nursery even with all the time on our hands because we simply cannot be bothered to look beyond “it’s too much to handle” to why is it so.
A return to your wholeness as a parent is as simple as dropping the resistance to your child’s expression of their whole sense of self unless it is unsafe or harmful. We resist choices made by our children. We resist their protests about what to eat or what to wear or how to spend their free time. We resist their invitations to engage as infants because cooking a perfect meal to satisfy our own needs since we feel so darn needy is way more important than attending to their needs. This continues our parental legacy.
Bubba will make their feelings known very openly. We resist the way they do this because that’s not how we are “supposed” to behave. We want well behaved well curated children. But we don’t want our children to be themselves because that might just pull the resistance off your eyes forcing you to let go of your need to control and let in your original self.
Our entire problem in life is resistance. Resistance to look beyond our comfort zones be these mental physical emotional ethereal or energetic. We are used to a particular way of being so we assume that’s it’s the way to be and the only way to be. The blinkers are on.
Well, we can’t parent with blinkers on can we? Unless what we want is children who are groomed to live conditioned lives out of cans. Because we won’t look to the source of our resistance let alone the cause of our persistence to resist, our children are left at the behest of very unconscious parenting cascading into issues in their adult lives.
We don’t just bring our children up; we bring ourselves up too in the process. We grown with them. We push ourselves beyond our own limits to meet their wholeness. Without breaking the barriers we are bereft of wholeness and run the risk of robbing our children of theirs.
We all have baggage. Do we “need” to pass this down to our children? Can they do without it? When is the right time to look into our story?
Each time you resist or reach any point of dissonance with your bubba, reach out for a pen, take a note. When you can, look at the resistance. Now own it. Then process the root. Disown it. And then integrate the root into your own story. Resistance gone!
When resistance leaves, relaxation arrives with bags full of calm conscious concerted parenting! Catch your resistance before it cages you.