“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit (even failure).”

~ Adapted from E.E. Cummings

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The 2nd Greatest Gift We Can Give Our Kids

The title of this week’s video and quote is “The Second Greatest Gift We Can Give Our Kids – And One That Some Kids Never Receive.” Of course, the first and most important gift we can give them is our love. As you may have heard me say in past videos, kids don’t know they are lovable until they are loved. Therefore, telling them how much we love them is crucial to their development and success because it has them beginning from a place of worth.

What a lot of kids never hear, however, is how proud their parents are of them, and how confident their parents are in their ability to make good decisions and create the life they want. There are several reasons for this.

One reason may be that they may have made some bad decisions in the past, and therefore, we as parents are worried that this trend could continue. While this is understandable, we have to realize that kids don’t make good decisions based on their fear of making bad decisions. It just makes things worse. The other two reasons, however, come from the role we take in our children’s lives and what it means to be a parent for many.

For example, we parents love to give our kids advice. The love of this role is partly due to our wanting them to know what we know so that they will be successful. And… it’s important to also acknowledge that we love this role because it helps us feel involved in our kid’s lives and because it makes us feel wise. Unfortunately, this becomes a problem when our advice comes across as if we have no confidence in them or what they know.

This can become especially problematic in the pre-teen and teenage years because this is the time our kids are trying to establish their independence, and therefore are hypersensitive to anything that threatens their confidence in their own decisions. Of course, this is also the time of their lives when they are most prone to making bad decisions, because the executive functions of their brains (the frontal lobes) won’t be fully developed until age 25.

Bottom line, we have the perfect storm, which explains why this time of everyone’s lives (theirs and ours) can be so “stormy.” Given that as parents our executive functions are fully developed, we must take more responsibility for engaging our kids in a way that gives them confidence in themselves. This means our “advice” must come in the form of additive information to what they already know versus some indication (however, misunderstood) that we have no confidence in their intelligence.

The second thing we as parents love to do is help our kids. Again, this helps us feel more a part of their lives, and we get to be the “helpers” which helps us feel good about ourselves. While this may seem innocuous (and very congruent with our role up until now), our being “extra helpful” by doing things for them that they can do for themselves can also send the message that we don’t have confidence in their abilities.

None of this is purposeful, but when our “advice-giving and helping” are perceived by our kids as no confidence, this can trigger the resistance and resentment which often characterizes parent/teen relationships.

The solution, therefore, is to become very purposeful in how we engage our kids and remember:
1. Every time we are interacting with our kids we are teaching them something.
2. We are not raising kids, we are raising people or adults.
3. Therefore, we should always interact with our kids in a way we would want them to emulate as adults.

This means we can’t teach respect by being disrespectful.
We can’t teach cooperation by being uncooperative.
And, we can’t teach them to have confidence in themselves by implying that we have no confidence in them.

Remember the quote from E.E. Cummings: “Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” I have added “even failure” to that list of risks.

Because no matter what we do, our kids will fail from time to time. However, if they have confidence in themselves, they can learn from these less than successful endeavors, and move forward, secure in the knowledge that they can succeed because those that loved them the most, those they looked to for evidence of their worth and value, always had the utmost confidence in their ability to succeed in life… the second greatest gift we can give those we love the most.

Take care and God bless, Dr. Bill