Click Here for many more positive, empowering, enlightening articles by Bob Lancer. For The Best Parenting Advice, See Bob Lancer's New Website: thebestparentingadvice.com The Price of Pressured Parenting:
A healthy, happy connection with your child by Bob Lancer Whenever you rush, if you are not very mindful of your feelings, you slip into anxiety. Anxiety expresses powerlessness, helplessness, and desperation, which the child picks up on, causing him to feel insecure and overloaded with responsibility. This drives the child into what appears to be rebellious, defiant, overly aggressive, unfocused activity (or inactivity). At the same time, your anxious, pressured mode imposes a break in your compassionate connection with the child, making you overly controlling and domineering as you lose touch with the child's true heart, positive intentions and basic feelings. If this is prolonged, a growing divide separates parent and child, deteriorating the relationship into one of increasing adversity, conflict, and unhappy power-struggle. You can avoid this, or begin turning it around, by recognizing first that the feeling of psychological pressure that accompanies anxiety, anger and overwhelm diminish your effectiveness and block your compassion. In this seminar we will focus on how you can meet the demands of parenting (including single parenting), and all of your other demands of life and work, with decreasing pressure, stress and strain. Learn how to get it all done, without becoming undone, for the good of your child and yourself. **** Parenting, The Law of Reflection
and The Power of Thought By Bob Lancer You teach your child to think about himself the way that you think about him. Children don't need us to worry about them; they need us to believe in them. Most mistakenly presume that the child's display of behavior and character determines how we must think of him or her. But one of the best kept secrets when it comes to bringing out the best in even the most challenging children is mastering the creative power of your thought for positively influencing child behavior and development.
Improving child discipline always begins with improving parent self-discipline, based on the powerful natural law of child development, which we can call The Law of Reflection. That law states that children develop behaviors and attitudes like those they spend time with. As you demonstrate love and wisdom through your own reactions, you automatically instill in your children responsible self-control. The level of reaction that is perhaps most commonly overlooked and underestimated is own thinking. How you think about our child is one way of reacting to your child's behavior, and it has a powerful influence upon the behavior your child displays.
How we think of a child functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. As you discipline yourself to consciously observe how you think of your child, and then let go of those thoughts that portray your child in disturbing ways, you help your child to fulfill her glorious potential.
Pay close attention to your experiences with your child to learn from them. You will notice when you do this that the angrier you feel when you attempt to control your child's behavior, the more powerless, confused and frustrated you feel. This is because: •Your angry state is working against you by making it impossible to think of any ideas but those that keep you feeling angry. •The measure of anger you feel expresses aggression, which triggers an equal measure of defensiveness in your child'. •Angry reactions, at their root, stem from an unconscious mental vision of yourself as a victim, and of your child as being beyond your control, which functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You can apply the Law of Reflection to help you to redirect just about any behavior your child exhibits. Let's say that your child demonstrates a lack of focus and tends to veer off track while engaged in tasks. Instead of lashing out at the child, criticizing her for being "a dreamer", determine to demonstrate a higher level of responsible focus in your own life. See how your own thoughts, speech and actions tend to drift off course. If you take on the arrogant attitude that you are perfectly focused, you overlook your own weaknesses in this area, and model a stubborn refusal to change for your child. Use the Law of Reflection to support your child's healthy attitudes. If your child seems to display low self-esteem, take that as a sign that you need to re-examine how you really think about yourself. Trying to improve a child's feelings about herself while you treat yourself disrespectfully proves absolutely futile. Recognize ways that you mistreat yourself, including living in an overly stressful pace, not exercising, overeating, and work on gradually improving. The "Wombian" By
Bob Lancer The baby, upon physical entry into the world outside the womb, feels departed from his homeworld world, the "wombworld" in which he has existed for his entire life. It takes nine months to fully acclimate to his new world, an acclimation that constitutes an utter metamorphosis. It is only then that she finally feels like a native of her new reality. Respecting this transition phase is essential to the infant's good feeling and well-being, and sets the pattern for that being's way of moving through all of the transitions of life that follow. The emergence into a disconnected physical condition could not be more profound. The feeling of physical union within the mother has not only been constant before birth, it has been absolutely necessary for survival, and the womb-child or "wombian" has an instinctive response to this. This is why so much holding is begged for by the new baby, and appropriate, even essential to provide, particularly from her mother whose body has been one with his own for a lifetime. Compassionately, sensitively acknowledge this deep dimension of the child's disorientation by generously, even copiously cuddling this innocent this "stranger in a strange land", this "fish out of water". This makes for a happier, healthier, more secure baby, and a happier, healthier, more secure individual for life. The parent's sense of estrangement toward this otherworldly being is natural. Give yourself time to bond with this human creature whose eyes wander from yours. Allow yourself to fall in love naturally, but endlessly, and you will. As you do, your love opens the pathway, spiritually and physically, for the infant to emerge gracefully from the wombian stage. You will fall in love naturally as you observe the face of your heavenly gift with your heart open. When you feel the slightest stirring there, hold your attention on that stirring. Your power flows in the direction of your attention. Imagine that through the radiance of your loving gaze flows your love into the child's heart, nurturing the flowering of that new heart. When that new heart feels like your heart, you have fallen in love. Treasure this fleeting period of your wombian's raw nature. Release any pressure you feel to have the child move more quickly into expressions of "humanhood" with which you can more easily identify. Let your heart meld with the pure innocent heart of the babe to rekindle your innocent love's core. Enjoy the blank-stare-stage of the alien, even as the infant seems more oriented to a previous life, emits an uncomfortable, if not painful sense of belonging in some "otherwhere". Patience permits you to be at peace with, not at war against, what how your child is. It places you and your child on the same side. Power struggles drain power. Patience permits the blossoming of beauty in our natural world. Your patience is a balm that soothes the newborn's sense of extreme openness and essential otherness. Patience permits your adoration to expand until you once again contain this living gift within you. Click Here to see many more articles by Bob Lancer. |
