We all want our children to do well and be successful. While there can be any number of expectations from our children, when asked about what they want their children to accomplish most in life, most of my coaching clients respond with goals like, “we would like them to be successful at discovering and fulfilling their true passion”, “we hope they can get involved in happy and meaningful relationships”, “it’s important that they grow up to be good and caring people”, “we hope they can be responsible citizens and someday contribute to the broader community” and so forth. Parenting can be a really challenging experience. While we all intend to make the best effort towards helping our children achieve their dreams, more often that not, we are operating from limited experience and are at best learning from “on-the-job” training. It is further onerous to realize that childhood experiences indeed substantially shape the future the children have as adults and in a way, unless we pay attention to make amends, impact of ineffective parenting can continue to perpetuate from one generation to the next. Decades of psychology research clearly brings forth the power of childhood experiences – about how children of preoccupied parents grow up to be avoidant individuals or how sometimes loved and sometimes ignored children become anxious adults. Research also proves that childhood experiences can predict the personality traits in adults in terms of their being secure, anxious, or avoidant, with up to 70% accuracy.

Based on my personal coaching experiences, here are three powerful thoughts (love, boundaries, and inspiration) that I believe can significantly contribute to effective parenting.

Love
“If you start judging people, you will have no time to love them.” Mother Teresa

Love provides for a very basic need of a child – the need to feel secure. Loving parents can create a strong foundation of inner security for a child to spring forth other values and skills. Loving environment at home builds a child’s self-esteem and self-confidence – a sense of knowing their unique and special place in this world. High self-esteem may also lay the groundwork for the child’s exploration and discovery of his true passions. Love also builds a child’s emotional strength – vital for, developing stronger relationships as well as dealing with failure.

Now, while love comes naturally to parents, the leap required is in practicing unconditional love – one that is free from any judgments and parental agenda. How often do we judge our children for what they do well and what they don’t – and then admonish them for their mistakes? These could be related to daily irritants like not neatly organizing their rooms, feeling shy in front of visiting adults, poor performance in school test, or not following parents’ instructions carefully. While these reprimands are all intended to make the kids become better equipped to face the challenges of life, this evaluative approach poses two challenges – one, this is largely driven by the parents’ subconscious desire to see the kids turn out to be like their idealized versions of themselves and second, this constantly gives the impression to the children that they are always short of perfect. Maybe as a society, and surely as parents, it’s time for us to move away from inculcating perfectionism to encouraging much needed wholesomeness. Unconditional love requires us to feel love for them at all times – even when we notice patterns that are different from our expectations. This requires parents to have the inner confidence that their children are wholesome and complete and will grow up to effectively live out their own unique purpose in life. As children feel confident that they will be loved irrespective of their achievements, it creates the environment for them to experiment with diverse and new ideas and be fearless of making mistakes. Mistakes are then not scolded upon but seen as natural and used as powerful learning opportunities. An additional way to nurture children’s sense of self-worth is by engaging with them on their area of interest. It is also better than plain adulation as that can divert their interest as well as potentially get them conditioned to becoming interested in an area only for admiration.

On the other hand, lack of love can alienate children from their true selves, resulting in inconsistent behavior. Lack of time from busy parents can lead kids to be largely influenced by TV, internet, and the peer group. Some of the results of that trend have been disturbing. More than a third of all murders in the US are committed by offenders under the age of 21 and over the decades, incidence of, teenage pregnancies, drug-abuse among the youth, and depression at puberty have grown substantially.

Boundaries
“It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.” John Gray

Within the space of unconditional love, there’s certainly place and need for setting clear boundaries as well. These boundaries are essential for children’s wholesome development and can range from things like, time for TV and video games, bed time, junk food, late nights to more severe issues of alcohol, sex and drugs. While the idea of setting limits may rest easy with many parents, the crucial aspect is the manner in which they are set. Set arbitrarily by the parents, the kids are likely to either rebel or not adhere to them or both. Alternately, the kids while submitting to the rules may end up subconsciously suppressing their true feelings and desires. However, if the limits are set in the context of family values and beliefs and communicated to the children in an open and engaging manner, they may surprisingly be well respected. In fact, rather than it be a disagreeable discipline, the process of creating these boundaries can be a great platform for some candid sharing, bonding and reinforcing important values. As children grow older, such open communication may also assist them to become true friends of the parents, something many a parent long for.

Needless to add, these boundaries need to be age appropriate. In that context, it’s important for parents to set some boundaries for themselves too. There is a precarious balance between love and suffocation. Excessive parental protection can easily stifle a child’s individuality – alternately, thoughtfully listening to the kids’ perspective can support their sense of self-identity to flourish. As parents we need to realize when to step back and give the children sufficient space to learn from their own experiences. Further, while correcting children, we need to learn the distinction, as Martin Seligman highlights, between specific and pervasive comments. Pervasive comments like, “you always mess up your tests”, hamper the opportunity for improvement; whereas, specific comments like “if you had worked hard, you would have done well in this test” are more supportive. Finally, parents need to be cognizant of the thin line between healthy and excessive self-esteem. Children with unrealistically positive views of themselves can feel they are better or worth more than others, that can overtime lead them to be self-indulgent and arrogant.

Inspiration
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” Buckminster Fuller

Despite the number of hours spent at school, home remains a powerful source of learning about life for kids. They learn an awful lot by observing. Parents can talk through important values but they won’t sink in unless the kids see them practiced by the parents, particularly in crunch situations. It’s the values people imbibe about love, money, relationships, hard work, careers, empathy, community and spirituality during childhood that drive their attitudes and behavior as adults. If we want our children to be compassionate, we must be kind and caring with others. It would be hard to expect children from an environment of constant friction among parents to grow up to be great at relationships. Rather than preach, we need to be the role models for our children. John Crabbe from Oregon Health and Science University espouses that while we are born with a diverse range of genes, it’s the upbringing that determines which genes get better expressed – making a strong case for parents to be the inspiration for their children to be the best they can be.

How else can we inculcate and reinforce these values in our children? So much of our time with kids is spent in transactional and relatively inconsequential conversations – are the kids ready to go to school, have they finished their homework, have they had their dinner and so forth. What maybe powerful to do sometimes is to engage them in more meaningful dialogues – ask them to describe the values they believe to be the most important in life, have a candid discussion about it, share our own experiences and so forth. Not only does this inculcate the key values, it allows them to think and discover these values for themselves. We can further help them internalize these ideals by generously acknowledging them every time they demonstrate those values. Similarly asking open-ended questions about their views of their own thoughts, feelings, emotions and behavior allows them to grow in their self-awareness, character and self-responsibility.