Understanding Your Child
- Megan Haldane
- Jun 28, 2017
- 5 min read
I always say to parents, 'In the end, you are the only ones who will stick with your children even when they are older and in trouble. You will be the ones to help them through because you are the ones with the main connection to them and the biggest commitment to them even if they reject you. Nobody else will ever care about them as much as you do.'
From their position you will always be their parent until they die, even if you yourself are dead and gone. So I say, do the work of conscious informed parenting right now while your children are developing, as yet unformed and extremely impressionable. Joan Rivers once said ‘They say you are only as happy as your least happy child” In my experience with parents I can say I have found this to be absolutely true… especially for women, these children's Mothers.
So the idea in reparenting is to have another go, do things very differently with your children. Many problems are in place because of the psychodynamic between the parent and child. This is what I am interested in and this is really what happens with reparenting. The child is disturbed ‘in’ the relationship … not just by what their experience was or is, but by what is happening in the dynamic between the parent and child. So if the parent changes, then the child will change. Reparenting is not about getting children to behave differently or properly. It is about changing ourselves so that we understand what ‘happened’ to our children to cause them to be disturbed. It is during this process that our children can be helped. We parent them again … essentially the same parents but in my work with them, parents develop a different way of being with the child. Sometimes people are reparenting their children through their thirties and older not just during infancy through to adolescence
It is critical that parents understand the deeper part of the minds of their children and how their minds form. Then they will be motivated by the fact that every living moment in their crucial early years impacts on the child's development and literally forms who they will become. With a little help and guidance parents can become more appropriate, skillful and effective in their parenting. First of all they have to learn to observe their children correctly, expertly.
One can never observe another correctly until one knows how to observe oneself.
Also, I must say here that people who have not had children can equally reparent themselves.
I often see parents, sometimes whole families, but generally parents whose children have a myriad of problems, behavioral problems, mental problems, learning difficulties, emotional problems especially anger and rage. It does not take long to find out that the parents also have problems, not only from the difficulties of having raised their children thus far but also difficulties in actually being a parent in the first place. After all, from where did they learn to become parents? Who taught them? They never ever took lessons. They learned in the main from their own experience of being parented by their own Mothers and Fathers. I can very quickly help them to see the mistakes they are making or have made and then I can teach them how to change. Often the mistakes are connected to their own human difficulties especially in the parenting role. They are very ignorant about how they affect their children purely by how they are treating them or have treated them. So I show parents how their children’s difficulties come from their development and that their children have not developed properly. Their children's development has a lot to do with their children's responses to how they perceive their parent is being with them. Each child has their own unique and individual propensities in this area. I do believe that every child comes into this world with their own unique and individual mind already set up with these very particular propensities. One child will respond to a parent in a particular way. Their sibling will respond entirely differently right from the very beginning of their life.
The children have not developed properly most often due purely to their parents’ ignorance. Ignorance is not a bad word. It is a good word. It is not a label. When I own my ignorance about something I am purely putting myself in a perfect position to learn more and choose to change. When I really teach people that how they have been or are being has strongly impacted their children, causing their children’s disturbance they definitely want to change that. So they work on it themselves without blaming themselves. Helping parents not to blame themselves and helping them deal with their unnecessary but ever present guilt, is a very important part of the work and as they change and abandon their guilt and self blame their children often show signs of improvement and change immediately … subtle maybe at first but eventually as parents learn to reparent their children the effects are powerful. They change their way of being with their children. They don’t even need to say much to their children about it. Better they say nothing even when the children are teenagers or adults. They just change the way they are with and around their children. I call that teaching by being … no analysis, not too much explanation.
For people without children, they too can learn to reparent themselves and alter some of their mind patterns that were set up from their very early developmental years. People can especially learn that, as young children, they were innocent, ignorant, dependent little beings who could only but rely on and respond to what happened to them and around them. Everything is still needed to be learned. They can make changes in the areas they did not learn very well in. When they understand and accept the choices they made were choices made due to adverse circumstances, self blame disappears and in its place a renewed journey of learning through change. Their choices were not always the best and did not aid their children's mental state. A child lacking adequate nuturing may choose to give themselves a nurtured feeling by turning to food. That is a choice they make. Another child may choose idleness to nuture themselves. That is the particular choice they make. Nothing 'just happens'. There are conscious and unconscious choices made by us all as we grow up. These are just made and they are strongly influenced by our own unique individual propensities. Some of these choices are very subtle but they all play a big part in forming us. We who are reparenting ourselves can decide to choose differently even in our adult years once we understand that very point. We chose one way of being and we can decide to choose a different way at any point in our lives. Of course it takes a lot of focus and hard work to break strongly entrenched habitual patterns of thinking and behaviour.
It is far more beneficial if we can do the work for our children whilst they are still growing. They will never know that we are doing this. It is perceived by the child as being just exactly as it is - quite normal so long as the parents are strong and committed, guilt free and truly understand the possibities and propensities of reparenting.
.
Comments