Four types of parenting styles
Clarify Your Purpose
When thinking and thought become more and more automatic, perception becomes less and less adapted to the particular situation.
– David Bohm
The first, all-important step for each of us is to determine what we want and what we’re parenting for. The following three exercises are offered to help you clarify your purpose for parenting. Please take your time with the exercises and see what you discover about yourself.
Exercise 1: What do you want for the long term?
Focusing on the long term puts present actions into perspective and often brings what is most important to you into sharper focus. Two questions can help you get clear what you are parenting for.
Guiding Questions:
What qualities do I want to see in my children when they are adults?
What kind of relationship do I want to have with my children, not only now but in the long term?
What do I notice when I sit with these questions and my answers?
Exercise 2: What will you do?
Please review the qualities you listed in Exercise 1 that you want to see in your adult children. Now apply your list to yourself and you will see more clearly exactly which traits you want to be modeling for your children now.
For every quality you listed as something you value and want to see in your adult children, turn it around to reflect the quality or values you want to live. For example, if you said that you want your adult children to be honest, turn it around, and say I value honesty; I want to tell the truth. If you want your children to care about their health, say I value health; I want to care about my health. These statements can be touchstones to remind you of your purpose and your practice.
Statements of Value Statements of Intention
I value… I want to…
Next, let your statements of values and intentions lead you to more specific actions you can take to support each value.
Specific Actions – I Want to Take
Explore Together: Choose Your Purpose
Exercises 1 and 2, above, can be used for children eight years of age or older to help them find their own purpose. Younger children, or anyone in the family who prefers, can make collages or drawings to show how they see themselves in the future, what is important to them, and what actions they can take to live from their values.
When all members of the family have finished these activities, share them at a family meeting.
Option: You can compile each family member’s purpose into one family collage, mission statement, poem, or other creative format.
Exercise 3: What is working?
No doubt you are already taking actions that serve your intentions. The following exercise is to draw your attention to what you are already doing that works to support your intention and create the results you want. Acknowledging and celebrating what works is one of the powerful, life-enriching practices parents can use to contribute to their own clarity, self-support, confidence, and balanced perspective.
What am I doing now that supports my values and intentions?
The secret of life is three words: change through relationship.
– J. Krishnamurti
Choose to Think in Alignment with Your Purpose
Our thought processes determine what we see, what we experience, and how we act. They filter and frame our interaction with the world and everything in it, including ourselves and our loved ones.
You might wonder, how do I choose my thoughts? Don’t they just happen?
Thoughts arise, and moment by moment you choose which you invite in and entertain. You are the editor of your thoughts, and you can learn how to direct them to support your parenting purpose. Anyone who chooses to focus on thoughts of who’s right and who’s wrong, what’s fair and what’s unfair, who’s bad and who’s good, will inevitably spend essential time and energy analyzing, judging, blaming, and criticizing. When you give your energy to analyzing, judging, blaming, and criticizing, you are in a sense voting for conflict. The consequence is that by assuming a conflict-ready stance, you distract your own attention from understanding and meeting the needs that your children are expressing through their behavior.
If you entertain thoughts that people are doing things to you-for example, that your child (or anyone else) is manipulating you, taking advantage of you, ignoring you, or disrespecting you-you will often feel annoyed, irritated, and angry. However, when instead you think in terms of the needs that you and your child are trying to meet in every action taken, then you are more likely to feel compassion and connection. And you are much more likely to take action that contributes to your child’s well-being as well as your own.
Your thoughts about your children determine how you see them and how you treat them. If you see your children as untrustworthy, you will tend to limit opportunities for them to make decisions and learn about trust. Also, when you say to your children, I can’t trust you, they are likely to take that message to heart. If instead you see your children as capable of handling life, you will convey your confidence, treat them with respect, and give them lots of opportunities to make decisions for themselves. Imagine the best for your children; give them the gift of your confidence.
Environment Is More Important than Genes
The new field of epigenetics studies how environmental signals affect and even control the activity of genes. It claims that the operations of the cell are primarily affected by and molded by the cell’s interaction with the environment, rather than by its genetic code. The environment of a child-made up of family interactions and the behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes of parents-directly affects the child’s subconscious mind and behavior, perhaps throughout their lifetime. This is because children’s subconscious is very suggestive to what parents say-and the subconscious takes in all information as fact. When parents make comments to children, like you’re lazy or you’re mean, these comments are downloaded into the subconscious memory as the truth and then shape the behavior and potential of the child throughout their life, unless an effort is made to reprogram them.*
* Lipton, The Biology of Belief.
