John Gray - Children Are from Heaven - Positive Parenting Skills for Raising Cooperative, Confident, and Compassionate Children

By feeling pain we are automatically induced

to correct our thoughts and actions.

Though this may seem bizarre, think for a moment about your common experience. Often, after a loss, when we feel the pain of that loss, we experience our regret and resolve to do things differently and learn from our mistakes. Feeling pain motivates change to avoid pain in the future. In addition, by being more aware of our feelings, we can tap into greater creativity and intuition from our inner potential. The ability to know right from wrong comes from our feelings. Feelings, whether negative (pain) or positive (pleasure), help us to make needed adjustments.

With this motivation, we open our minds and question what we have done. This inner questioning is the basis of self-correction. Unless we are motivated to change, we remain stuck in our narrow and limited ways of thinking.

Pain is our greatest teacher, because it motivates us to make adjustments in the way we do things. It causes us to question and rethink what is best for us and for others.

When people were numb to their feelings thousands of years ago, they needed punishment to connect with their feelings. With a greater awareness of their feelings, they could then accept or recognize what was right and reject what was wrong. Gradually, after being punished for centuries, just the thought of punishment was enough to awaken the feelings. Rule by punishment was necessary to sustain order and to enable a person to lead a good life.

Induced pain, whether through punishment or through spiritual sacrifice, awakened people to their feelings and increased their limited awareness of what is right and wrong. In this manner, punishment was a tool or skill to induce the feeling of pain, and, in various degrees, it motivated change.

Christian monks, even into this century, would often punish themselves to become more holy. They would whip themselves as a daily practice to deepen their connection with God.

As extreme as this may sound, self-flagellation was widely practiced. This and other forms of self-mortification are still practiced; it is not uncommon to give up comforts and pleasure in the name of being spiritual.

These practices are no longer necessary. The time to give up our lives for God is over. It is now time to live our lives fully for God. Everyone deserves abundance, prosperity, success, health, and love. We do not need to deprive ourselves of life’s pleasures to lead a life of goodness. Likewise, we do not need to deprive our children. If we want our children to live a life of abundance, we must find another way to motivate them, otherwise, after making mistakes, they will tend to punish and deprive themselves as well.

The time to give up our lives for God is over.

It’s now time to live our lives fully for God.

By feeling our loss naturally, we experience a greater awareness of what is right or wrong, and we feel the motivation to change. Another more biblical way of saying that we have “a greater awareness of what is right and wrong” is to say that we have “a greater awareness of the will of God.”

Today we no longer need to punish ourselves or our children to act in accord or in cooperation with the will of God.

We are born with the ability to know and do what is right, but having an ability or talent isn’t enough. To be realized, this ability must be nurtured and developed.

Children today have new needs. By fulfilling these needs, we directly nurture their ability to cooperate and increase motivation to yield their will to their parents. Our children today do not require outdated punishment; they have a greater potential and require a new and different kind of support.

Our children today have a greater

potential and require a new and different

kind of support.

This new ability has been in the making for a long time.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus taught this simple message: As you open your heart to God, your self, and your neighbor you will know the will of God; in the silence of your heart, a quiet voice will speak to you . By looking within, you will find, right now, the heaven you seek .

This quiet voice, often referred to in religious texts, comes from your heart and mind being open. It comes from feeling. As parents are able to speak and act more from love, their children also learn to listen, not only to their parents, but to the feelings of love in their hearts. Then they are motivated, not out of fear, but by love.

When parents raise children with open hearts, minds, and strong free wills, this quiet voice is not some exalted experience that only saints can hear, but a common experience motivating children’s daily behavior. When we can look within or “feel” then we discover that the kingdom of heaven is at hand — it is here and now. When we live from our hearts, then we have succeeded in bringing heaven to earth.

After two thousand years of trying to understand how to be loving and get what we want and need, we have finally arrived at our goal. It is now possible to apply the principles of love to raise our children. Even if these new skills for positive parenting were available thousands of years ago, they would not have worked. They would not have worked for everyone even fifty years ago. A shift in our global consciousness has made it possible for these new skills to work.

Now the old skills do not work.

Our prison system has proven that in a free society punishment no longer works. Under a dictatorship, the threat of punishment is extreme and fear is everywhere; that is how a dictatorship maintains order and low crime. In a free society, punishment has failed. Today, instead of building more schools, we are building more prisons. In many parts of the country, when someone is punished in our prison system, they often emerge, not rehabilitated, but as better criminals.

Rehabilitation centers could better be called criminal training centers. Clearly, in a society that allows personal freedom and respects human rights, the old ways of maintaining order by means of punishment are out of date. We cannot preach love and then turn around and punish the weakest elements of society. Fortunately, some prisons today are focusing more on methods to rehabilitate and not just on punishment.

Punishment doesn’t work in a free society, and it doesn’t work in loving families. The more children feel nurtured and loved, the more confusing punishment is. We cannot nurture our children and open their minds and hearts to be strong, creative, and capable, only to turn around and threaten them like animals. We cannot seek to make them feel good about themselves and then make them feel bad when they make mistakes.

We open our children to feeling good about

themselves and then turn around and make

them feel bad.

It is more damaging to open up children and then punish them than to ignore their feelings and wants, and occasionally punishing them to maintain control. If we are to give our children the opportunity to open up their minds and hearts and develop a strong will, we must learn another way to motivate other than punishment.

Even animal trainers are learning news ways to train dogs, horses, tigers, and other animals without punishment. I learned more about parenting by talking with animal trainers than from many of the parenting books available to parents.

There is so much confusion when it comes to parenting, and one of the most controversial issues is punishment.

Everyone senses that punishment doesn’t work and is inhumane, but they don’t know a different way. Many are resistant to the idea of giving up punishment, because the soft-love type of parenting clearly has failed. Children who are not punished are often unruly, undisciplined, and disrespectful to each other and to adults and teachers. Yet every parent, at some time, has felt in their quiet moments that there must be a different way. Fortunately, there is an alternative to punishment, and the collective consciousness of our planet is ready for it to work.