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

As adults, we have forgotten what it is like to view the world without these mental abilities. From children’s perspective, the world is a big place that can be upsetting, confusing, and create a lot of anxiety. The world today is even more negative and invasive than in previous generations.

With technological advances in communication, children are being bombarded with negative information and stimulation all the time.

Children are being bombarded with negative

information and stimulation more now than

at any time in history.

When a child is kidnapped, raped, or murdered in another state or country, the story is in your face wherever you turn. It is on TV, in the news, in magazines, on the radio and the Internet. When this news is brought into the home, from your children’s perspective it is as if the tragedy happened next door and could easily happen to them. Too much exposure to the abuse and misfortune in the news numbs children’s natural sensitivity and weakens their feeling of connection to parental control.

Repeated exposure to violence and crime

falsely normalizes what is not normal or

natural to life.

Children in the past were never forced to face and deal with so many painful and negative realities of the real world.

Even adults have difficulty dealing with too much news about the real world. Adults at least have brain capacity to interpret world events more correctly — children do not.

Whatever parents can do to protect their children from this intrusion will assist their children in feeling safe, confident, secure, and protected.

Before the development of logical thinking, children need lots of reassurance that everything is okay. Without the ability to reason or apply logic, children form incorrect beliefs and conclusions. Here are some examples:

When children don’t feel loved, they conclude that they will never be loved.

If something is lost, a child believes it may never be found or be replaced.

If children can’t have a cookie now, they think they will never get a cookie.

This insight helps parents understand why children have such strong emotional reactions.

Children are willful, feeling beings without

the benefit of a logical mind.

When parents go away, children may conclude that they will never come back. Reasons cannot reassure children, but listening can. An empathetic response to children’s tender feelings communicates a reassuring message, even though they cannot yet reason on their own.

Reasons cannot reassure children,

but listening can.

The parents know they will be back and that everything is okay. This knowing is conveyed directly from the consciousness of a parent when she calmly and lovingly listens and reassures the child that everything is okay. By feeling connected, the child gains the benefit of the parent’s life experience and consciousness.

Until about the age of nine, children have a different kind of memory. They can remember words, thoughts, and concrete actions. Since they have not yet developed logical thinking, they live more in the moment. It is unrealistic to ask a child younger than nine to remember to bring his lunch box or to put something away. He can learn to do these behaviors by repeated guidance and repetition, but should not be expected just to remember because it makes sense.

A mother mistakenly explains, “If you forget your lunch, then you will go hungry at school.” A child cannot comprehend this reason or even think reasonably about her future.

The best a parent can do is simply ask, “Would you please get your lunch box?” or “Would you please put that away?”

To expect too much from a child just reinforces a feeling that the parent is out of control and that the child is bad for being resistant or inadequate in some way. Neither of these conclusions is correct. The child is simply not ready to remember things because they make sense or are reasonable.

It is wounding to a child when a parent gets frustrated and says, “How could you forget?” The truth is, the child didn’t forget, because he couldn’t remember in first place. If anyone forgot, it is the parent, not knowing what to expect from children younger than nine years old.

When wanting more, strong-willed children can eventually accept what is possible and what is not, because their parents have already learned to accept. The child benefits from the parents’ experience that you may not always get what you want right away, but, if you don’t give up, you will eventually get what you need. When children experience the pain of loss, delay, or disappointment, but feel understood, they connect with the maturity or expanded consciousness of the parent who is listening.

When children feel understood, they

automatically connect with the maturity of

the parent who is listening.

Strong-willed children will throw tantrums, but they will also gradually become more cooperative. Resistant children come back to their inner willingness to cooperate with their parents, because resistance itself creates the friction necessary to increase their feeling of connection. Children need to resist their parents from time to time in order to feel their connection. When they feel their connection once again, they are suddenly open and receptive to their parents’ leadership and guidance. This new insight changes the way we view children’s negative behaviors or attitudes.

When children are unruly or uncooperative, they are not bad — they are just out of control. They do not need punishment or to feel in order to self-correct or become more disciplined.

Instead, they just need to come back into control. Whose control? Their parents’ control. When parents apply the five skills of positive parenting, their children are once again back in control and happy to accommodate and cooperate.

Children are never bad, they are just

out of control.

With positive parenting, children are not just being controlled, they are being given the ability to feel that control.

This is why positive parenting was not discovered before.

Children in previous generations were not yet born sensitive enough to feel their parents’ control. Without the ability to feel, children would not respond to positive parenting.

Today, because a shift has taken place in the collective consciousness, these skills work for all children and teens, even if they were not raised with them. Children and teens of all ages will begin to respond right away.

Positive parenting skills work because

children today have a greater ability to feel.

Other more common, permissive parenting approaches have failed because they were not complete. It is not enough simply to let your children be and do whatever they want.

To give children greater freedom, parents must provide strong leadership. By learning to balance increasing freedom with greater control, the skills of positive parenting are successful.

By nurturing the feeling connection between parent and child, positive parenting provides a balance of freedom and control. Children experience the freedom to be unique and different, but also feel the strong need to imitate and learn from the parent. The freedom to resist actually strengthens children’s sense of self, while simultaneously connecting them to the parents’ will and consciousness.

The permission to say no helps children to identify their own desires, but, ultimately it strengthens their deepest desire to cooperate and gain the love and support of the parent. Without feeling awareness of their connection to their parents, children quickly forget their primal desire to cooperate. By using the five skills of positive parenting, the connection between parent and child is reestablished and once again the child is cooperative.