It is not difficult to see that children growing up in a household develops personalities based around the family members. At an early age say 5-10, children have no references to base their opinion on and naturally they look to their parents or elders to satisfy their curious minds. What many parents fail to realize is that the part they play in those tender ages can have a profound psychological bearing on the upbringing of the child. We often hear of stories where troubled people going into their adulthood almost always blame how they came to be on their parents. You may have heard cases where the ‘mature’ adult has blamed his aggressive nature because his father used to beat him up badly. Or the case where the ‘mature’ woman finds it difficult to make important decisions since the mother always used to remind her of that.

Parenting requires understanding your own behavior

I put apostrophes around the word mature, because maturity would indicate knowing your shortcomings and trying to do something about it rather than blame another for the situation you are in. Many people go through life without ever realizing their shortcomings and this becomes even more important when it comes to raising children. We may feel that what we do or think should not have any bearing on the child, but it has a huge effect! Unless you pay attention to the small subtleties that children are picking up from the conversations and actions you have with them or your spouse, you may be sending mixed signals which will affect them for years to come. Your actions will be all important to the development of your child. I will give you another example of a careless approach that parents overlook on no fault of their own but the damaging effect it can have on their children.

Take the case of a young woman who wants to buy a house and to move out of the family protection to be more independant. Unfortunately, the parents have their own views on the cost of a home and upon finding out that their 28 year old daughter had gone and made an offer on an house that they feel to be too high, there is naturally tension between them. However, the odd thing is that the parents encouraged her to go and look for a house that she wants to buy. However, it pains them to think that their own daughter has paid too much on the house and she should relinquish it. The father then decides that he will take on the responsibility of finding a house for her daughter and so she agrees. You may be wondering, what is wrong with that? There are several problems with this..for a start the parents have given her freedom and then almost immediately took it away. This is why you are going to get children into adulthood who are insecure in their decision making. The whole idea of buying a house in the first place was the decision of the daughter. Secondly, the parents are dearly wanting the daughter to see her find her own happiness in being independent and eventually settling down to get married. The parents have always griped about how she can’t do this or do that and not able to stand up for herself. So now you can understand the damage that parents are unknowingly bringing to their children. These actions only creates a cyclical event within the family time and time again, in one hand you have parents who want their children to be independant but on the other they are incapable of making important decisions in their lives.

What the parents have failed to realize is that their actions came about on the factor of money and thereby giving more importance to that and taking away the important factor of independent thinking. Their daughter who obviously also with the same mindset like their parents does in fact agree and ends up also making a wrong decision herself and so the cycle repeats.

There is no single solution to parenting, but the most important thing to understand is when you say something, really mean it. Otherwise whatever you say will be empty in substance because you would be prepared to retract from it if something does not meet your expectations.