A Parent's Quest- Part 2: Understanding Your Quest

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!