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

Although we now accept this insight as common knowledge, fifty years ago it was not common.

Before this new insight, how we parented was not a priority. Our success in life was attributed mainly to genes, family status, hard work, opportunity, character, religious affiliation, or luck. In Eastern cultures, which commonly believe in past and future lives, past karma was also seen to be the major contributing factor. If you were good in a past life, then good things will happen for you in this life.

Certainly, parents have always loved their children, but how they demonstrated that love with parenting skills was not recognized to be that important.

Now, after fifty years of counseling psychology, we have discovered the way parents demonstrate their love makes an enormous difference to their children. With this increased knowledge of the importance of childhood, parents today feel much greater pressure and responsibility to find the best way to parent their children. Often this pressure to be perfect parents leads them in the wrong direction.

Parents commonly make the mistake of focusing too much on providing more. And what they are providing more of is often counterproductive: more money, more toys, more things, more entertainment, more education, more after-school activities, more training, more help, more praise, more time, more responsibility, more freedom, more discipline, more supervision, more punishment, more permission, more communication, etc. More of these things are not necessarily what children today need most. As in other areas of life, more is not always better. Instead of more, what children need is “different.” As parents, we don’t have to give more, instead we need an approach different from our parents’.

Today we are faced with the challenge of reinventing parenting. Instead of assuming responsibility to mold our children into responsible and successful adults, it is becoming increasingly apparent that our role as parents is only to nurture what is already there. Within every child are the seeds of greatness. Our role is to provide a safe and nurturing environment to give that child a chance to develop and express his or her potential.

Traditional parenting skills and approaches that were appropriate in the past will not work for children today.

Children today are different. They are more in touch with their feelings and thus more self-aware. With this shift in awareness, their needs have changed as well. Every generation moves ahead to solve the problems of the past, but new challenges emerge in making that step.

In any field of endeavor, we must make adjustments to continue being successful. The needs of our children today are different from previous generations’. As parents, we are now facing a change that has been in the making for the last 2000 years. It is the shift from fear-based to love-based parenting.

Positive parenting is a shift from fear-based

to love-based parenting.

Positive parenting focuses on new approaches and strategies to motivate children with love and not through the fear of punishment, humiliation, or the loss of love. Though this sounds reasonable when compared to traditional approaches to parenting, it is an extremely radical notion. Love-based parenting is in conflict with our deepest instinctive reactions when we feel that we are out of control or when we feel afraid of losing control.

This love-based approach focuses on motivating children to cooperate without using the fear of punishment. Every parent knows the automatic reaction of, “If you don’t stop, I will . . .” And then comes the threat. Or the old fashioned phrase, “If you don’t listen to me, I’ll tell your father when he gets home.” Managing our children with fear, no matter how much we don’t want to do it, is an automatic reaction. In many schools today, teachers attempt to motivate their children to do better by means of fear of college entrance exams. All this fear just makes our children more anxious or depressed. Some children are already preparing for college in first grade.

Giving up spanking, threatening, and punishing may sound like a loving thing to do, but when your child is throwing a tantrum in the checkout line, and you just don’t know what else to do, threatening or spanking seems to be the only solution. When your child refuses to get dressed in the morning for school or resists brushing his teeth at night, automatically you resort to threats and punishment. Even if you don’t want to use threats and punishment, when nothing else works it is all you have. And it is all you have, because we haven’t yet learned the skills of positive parenting.

When your child is throwing a tantrum in the

checkout line, you just don’t know what else

to do; threatening or spanking seems to be

the only solution.

It becomes possible to change our parenting approach and to do it differently from the way we were raised only when we find a new way that works. You can successfully give up outdated fear-based parenting skills when you have learned the new and necessary skills to awaken and draw from your children the part of them that wants to cooperate and is already motivated to behave in harmony with your will and wish.

Thousands of years ago, children were treated worse than we would treat animals today. If children disobeyed a parent, they were severely beaten or punished, and sometimes even killed. Burial sites in Rome from two thousand years ago have revealed the bodies of hundreds of thousands of young boys who were beaten and killed by their fathers for being disobedient. Over the years, we have moved away from such extreme abusive and violent treatment.

Today most parents spank or hit their children only as a last resort, when nothing else seems to work or when the parent goes out of control. Still the legacy of the past holds on. Even in a relatively peaceful home, children can be heard saying, “If you do that you’ll be killed” or “They’ll kill you for that.” Although, if questioned, these children don’t literally mean “killed,” but it is a clear indication of the influence of fear to create orderly or good behavior. Although we have come a long way in the last two thousand years, the use of fear remains entrenched.

Some parents still think their children need to be spanked. I remember one dramatic example. Ten years ago, I had a conversation with a taxi driver from Yugoslavia. He mentioned that the problem in America is that parents are too soft. They don’t beat their children. I asked him if he was beaten. He was proud to say that is why he turned out so well and so had his children. Neither he nor his children had ever spent the night in jail. He went on to say that not a day passed when he was growing up that he was not beaten.

As an adult, he was grateful for the beatings he had received.

He assured me that this was a common practice in his country and it had saved him from becoming a criminal.

This is an amazing psychological reaction. Quite often, children who are severely beaten or abused will bond even more with the abuser. Over time, they begin to justify the abuse and feel they deserved it. Instead of recognizing what they experienced as abuse, they defend their parents’ behavior.

When they have children, naturally they feel their children deserve the same abuse. This is why it can be so difficult for some parents to adjust to positive parenting. They hold on to fear-based parenting, because they were punished and feel that their children deserve it as well. They believe their rearing helped them to be better citizens and so it will help their children. It is common to hear an abused child say, “I was so bad that they had to beat me.”