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

Rather than mindlessly obeying their parents, children are given the opportunity to choose to cooperate.

Letting children say no opens the door for them to express feelings and to discover what they want and then to negotiate.

It does not mean you will always do what the child wants.

Even though the child can say no, it does not mean the child will always get his or her way. What the child feels and wants will be heard, and this in itself often makes a child much more cooperative. More important, it allows a child to be cooperative without having to suppress his or her true self.

Letting a child say no does not mean the

parent will do what the child wants.

There is a big difference between adjusting your wants and denying your wants. Adjusting your wants means shifting what you want to what your parents want. Denying means suppressing your wants and feelings and submitting to your parents’ wants. Submission results in breaking the child’s will.

Without a strong will, your children are easily influenced by negative trends in society or peer pressure from other teens who are out of their parents’ control. When a person does not have a strong sense of self, he is easy prey for others to manipulate and abuse. He will even be attracted to abusive relationships and situations, because he feels so unworthy and afraid of asserting his own will. Without a strong will, it is hard for preteens and teenagers to stand up for what they believe and too easy to be swayed by peer pressure.

Adjusting one’s will is called cooperating ; denying by submission of one’s will is being obedient . Positive parenting practices seek to create cooperative children, not obedient children. It is not healthy for children to follow their parents’ will and wish mindlessly or heartlessly.

Giving children permission to feel and verbalize resistance when it occurs not only helps them develop a sense of self, but it also makes them more cooperative. Obedient children just follow orders; they do not think, feel, or contribute to the process. Cooperative children bring their full self to every interaction and are able to thrive.

When children have permission to resist, it actually gives the parent more control. Each time a child resists and then surrenders her will to her parents’ will, the child is able to experience and actually feel that mom and dad are the bosses. The ability to feel her connection to her parents’ control provides the basis for positive parenting.

When children have permission to resist,

parents actually gain more control.

This felt connection sustains in children a strong willingness to imitate their parents’ behavior and to cooperate with their will, while also providing the freedom to discover who they are, make mistakes and self-correct, feel and release negative emotions, want more and adjust to what is possible, and negotiate getting more. The permission to say no or resist authority is actually what keeps children aware that they are being controlled. It provides an essential safety net of security that supports each stage of a child’s development.

To be successful in life, an adult pulls from a variety of inner resources. These resources are love, wisdom, power, confidence, integrity, morality, creativity, intelligence, patience, and respect, to name a few. The sum of all these resources is a person’s unique perspective or consciousness. An adult decision or reaction to a situation is based on the adult’s consciousness.

When children feel an inner connection to their parents, they are able to benefit from their parents’ consciousness. When children feel connected, they are in a sense plugged into their parents, and the light of their parents’ consciousness affects everything the child says and does.

Connected children automatically benefit

from their parents’ consciousness.

This parental consciousness gives children the security and confidence to be themselves and the ability to self-correct after making a mistake. As long as children feel connected, they automatically self-correct without long lectures or the threat of punishment. With the benefit of their parents’ consciousness, children will automatically self-correct through trial and error.

Just being in the presence of an adult gives children the extra consciousness to behave harmoniously and creatively.

Children always learn most effectively in the presence or under the supervision of a parent or teacher. The more connected children are, the more they are able to benefit from that supervision.

Children can express and then release negative emotions because of the reassuring presence of their parents’ consciousness. Children, before the age of nine, cannot reason, but with the support of an empathetic parent they can benefit from their parent’s ability to reason and then release negative emotions.

Crying in the arms of a loving parent automatically heals the pain of a frightened child.

Crying alone with no one listening or caring reinforces a sense of abandonment, and the fear is not released. Children live in an eternal now. Without the ability to reason, they are constantly misinterpreting reality.

Just because children can imitate and

communicate, parents mistakenly assume

that children can reason as well.

When someone is mean, children assume the person will always be mean. If someone is loved more, then that person will always be loved more. If on the news someone is robbed, then a child concludes that he could easily be next.

He cannot comprehend that he is safer because his house has locks on its doors. That conclusion requires logical thinking.

He can feel safer if mommy or daddy hears his fear and then reassures him.

When looking for a good school for my children, I remember a comment made by another parent, who said, “It doesn’t really matter what kind of teachers or kids there are at school. A kid’s got to learn sometime that it’s a jungle out there. It’s better they learn now what they are going to deal with rather than later.” Although this might sound compassionate and streetwise, it is not.

Children should be protected from the negativity of the world as much as possible until they have the brain capacity to interpret that reality correctly. When the body is developing in the womb, it requires the protection and support of the mother’s body. Likewise, for the next nine years, children need protection from the negativity of the world. You don’t prepare your children for a bad experience by giving them a bad experience.

A child is like a little seed sprouting which needs protection from harsh weather until it has a chance to be stronger.

Children need to be protected from a bad teacher, a rough crowd at school, evening news, etc. Loving parents and family, supportive friends, and teachers provide the ideal womb for a developing child.

Cognitive abilities develop much later in children. It takes nine years for their brains to develop the capacity for the logical interpretation of reality. Ideally, children should be protected from the harsh realities and negativity of the world until about nine years old. It is not until age fourteen that a child can consistently think abstractly, understand or propose hypothetical situations, reason logically on their own, and look at issues from another’s point of view. A few years earlier preteens may have the beginnings of these cognitive abilities, but they have not yet fully developed.

Without these cognitive abilities, children experience the world very differently.