Mastering the Art of Parenting

The most important single role of parenting is to love and take care of your children and to build in them feelings of high sense of worth and self-confidence. If you raise your children feeling terrific about themselves, if you bring them up full of enthusiasm to go out and take on the world, then you have fulfilled your responsibility in the highest possible sense. 

Why Parents Don't Love Enough 

There are two major reasons for the breakdown by parents to love their children enough. First, the parents do not feel affection for themselves. Parents with low self-esteem have great difficulty giving more love to their children than they feel for themselves. The second reason that parents don't love their children enough is they often have the incorrect notion that their children exist to fulfill their expectations. 

Children are Not Possessions

The starting point of raising super kids is to realize that your children are not your property. Your children belong to themselves. They are a bequest to you from high above, and a temporary gift at that.

Children are a Precious Gift

When you look at your children as precious gifts that you can only take pleasure in for a short time, you see your position as parents differently. When you rejoice and support the special nature and personality of your child, he or she grows like a flower in sunshine. But if you try to get your child to be something he or she is not, your child's spirit will become weak, and his or her potential for happiness and joy will shrivel like a leaf on a tree in autumn.

Love Makes the Difference
The most important selflessness in raising super kids is the amount of love they receive. Children need love like flowers need water. An uninterrupted flow of love and appreciation from the parent to the child is the child's lifeline to emotional and physical health. Love deprivation is surely the most serious dilemma that a child can suffer during his or her formative years.

Unconditional Love and Acceptance

Make it clear to your child that nothing he or she does could ever cause you to love him or her less than 100 percent. The most fantastic gift you can give your child is the absolute conviction that you love him or her completely, without condition, no matter what he or she does and no matter what happens.

Praise and Encouragement

Give your children continual praise and encouragement for the positive things they do, even small things. Praise and highlight what you would like to see repeated. Praise them to build their self-esteem and self-confidence.

Action Exercise
Ask yourself what it would be like to be your own child. Put yourself in the place of your child or your children, and then assess yourself as a parent. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What do you do well and what do you do poorly? What are some of the thing that you do that might be causing your children to grow up with lower self-esteem than you would like? What can you do, starting today, to be a better and more loving parent?