So you've accepted your Parental Quest to make a joyful family and point your child toward a happy life. High five! But what does that mean? If you were Bilbo, you'd need at least to know that you were going to cross some perilous mountains and steal some treasure from a fire-breathing dragon. The quest is not to go to the ocean and find buried treasure. A lot more details would come up along the quest, but you'd want at least a basic idea of what you were trying to do, or weren't trying to do. Here are the basic ideas for your Parental Quest. There will be more details to learn later:
1) What you are trying to do: create a relationship with your child in which your child feels like the most important thing in your world. Your child will feel respected, loved, valued, comforted, encouraged, and confident. This relationship will also make YOU feel supremely happy. This relationship is the treasure that you will find. As you mature, you will realize that it is more precious than gold.
2) The perilous mountains you will cross are the months and years of changing your priorities. Putting down the video game controller and leaving your computer to value your child and play with her/him is a simple example. Making a child feel important means treating him/her as important--more important than other priorities. Like climbing a mountain, this takes time, energy, determination, and perseverance.
3) The dragon you must slay is your own untamed emotions. The metaphor breaks down a little here, because you don't really slay your emotions. Rather, you learn to manage them or tame them. But the point is that you can't have joy at home if you're breathing fire on your family. If you want to find the treasure, your family must feel safe: physically safe from spanking, hitting, etc., and also emotionally safe from yelling, belittling, ignoring, and abandonment. And you're the one that can create that atmosphere in your home by your daily choices.
I must tell you that your Quest may be challenging. The mountains may be steep, and the dragon may be crafty and difficult to tame. You may feel discouraged at times. But no one can take up your Quest but you. It is yours alone, and YOU CAN DO IT! And incidentally, the treasure is SO worth it!
Sunday, April 1, 2012
A Parent's Quest- Part 1: Embracing your Quest
In life, we make choices. It's unavoidable. The one thing we don't get to choose is if we make choices or not! Even choosing to NOT make a choice is a choice. The result of making a choice is that a new set of choices presents itself. Those choices also bring new opportunities for choice into view. Choice after choice, we shape our lives, inwardly and outwardly, such that over time we have become the people we have chosen to become. This is the unavoidable responsibility that we each bear: that we have chosen our way. Presumably, you're reading this because you've made the choice to create a family. Likely, you've made the choice to have children. You're reading Joyful Families because you are choosing to search the internet for ideas that can create greater happiness in your home. I'm making the choice to reach out over the internet because I care about families and especially about children. If we both choose well, the future will be brighter with happiness--and future happy choices.
Children start out their lives without choice. They depend on their parents to make choices to benefit their lives. By the time children gain the ability to make choices, their parents have already helped shape their lives and souls in such a way that certain choices are easily visible for them, but other choices may not be apparent or seem within reach. By the age of 5, children enter the school system. They are not at all equal. Some are prepared academically, socially, and emotionally to succeed in that arena. Others are prepared in only one or two of these areas. Still others are not prepared in any of these areas. They are expected to sit down, manage their emotions, and learn. That choice may seem out of reach for some of them. These unfortunate children begin to fail, and it may be years before they learn to develop the skills that can help them to choose success. It is clear that parents have the responsibility to give their children a good start in life, with their faces toward choices of joy.
But how do we do that as parents? Mostly we are already doing the best we know how to do. If we have preschoolers, how do we know if we are preparing them well before age 5? If we have school-age children that are struggling, what are we supposed to do about it? What actions can we take to increase the likelihood that our children will succeed and that our families will be joyful? May we suggest the following steps:
1) First off, accept the quest to be the one to take positive action. It puts our child at risk to assume that someone else--a spouse, an ex-spouse, a teacher, etc., will be the one to choose help our child. It is especially a mistake to assume that our child will spontaneously figure out how to choose to be different. We're the adults. We have a much bigger ability to choose. Let's agree that "It's up to me."
2) Take an honest inventory of our family. Are we creating joy? If I were a child, would I like to live in this family? Would I feel encouraged, loved, and understood? Would I feel frightened or angered or hurt by the way I was talked to or treated?
3) Make a list of things that could be improved in your relationship with your child and spouse, if any.
4) Make a choice. Choose at least one thing on the list and start working on it! Day by day, you can make choices that will open up more happiness and improved future choices to you and your family. You can do this!
Children start out their lives without choice. They depend on their parents to make choices to benefit their lives. By the time children gain the ability to make choices, their parents have already helped shape their lives and souls in such a way that certain choices are easily visible for them, but other choices may not be apparent or seem within reach. By the age of 5, children enter the school system. They are not at all equal. Some are prepared academically, socially, and emotionally to succeed in that arena. Others are prepared in only one or two of these areas. Still others are not prepared in any of these areas. They are expected to sit down, manage their emotions, and learn. That choice may seem out of reach for some of them. These unfortunate children begin to fail, and it may be years before they learn to develop the skills that can help them to choose success. It is clear that parents have the responsibility to give their children a good start in life, with their faces toward choices of joy.
But how do we do that as parents? Mostly we are already doing the best we know how to do. If we have preschoolers, how do we know if we are preparing them well before age 5? If we have school-age children that are struggling, what are we supposed to do about it? What actions can we take to increase the likelihood that our children will succeed and that our families will be joyful? May we suggest the following steps:
1) First off, accept the quest to be the one to take positive action. It puts our child at risk to assume that someone else--a spouse, an ex-spouse, a teacher, etc., will be the one to choose help our child. It is especially a mistake to assume that our child will spontaneously figure out how to choose to be different. We're the adults. We have a much bigger ability to choose. Let's agree that "It's up to me."
2) Take an honest inventory of our family. Are we creating joy? If I were a child, would I like to live in this family? Would I feel encouraged, loved, and understood? Would I feel frightened or angered or hurt by the way I was talked to or treated?
3) Make a list of things that could be improved in your relationship with your child and spouse, if any.
4) Make a choice. Choose at least one thing on the list and start working on it! Day by day, you can make choices that will open up more happiness and improved future choices to you and your family. You can do this!
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