Parenting our children – outside and inside by Heidi Hornlein

Where the transformational teaching of" Feminine Power" meets every day life....

Children need education. I think we all agree on that. But what form of education? There are many different opinions and concepts.

 In the masculine paradigm children were ‘educated’ to follow the will of the parents, they are punished when they don’t and they remain largely ignorant about why things are how they perceive them to be. Nobody bothers to explain in words adapt to their age what is really going on in the situations of their life when they are admonished, blamed or punished. The young child is interpreting the world with its restricted means of knowledge and understanding – and more often than not it comes to the conclusion that there is something wrong with themselves, that they are bad or unloved or what so ever. Children in the egocentric stage of development just take everything as directly referred to themselves, even when it is not about them at all, from the perspective of the adults around them. So it is inevitable that they create a self-image which is very different from the objective reality.

In the attempt to overcome the authoritarian style of education people threw the baby out with the bathwater. They tried to encourage their children to “be themselves” by not setting any boundaries at all, creating little desperate devils who have no framework to find orientation of what is right and what is wrong, no possibility to define their world of reality. This leads equally to erroneous assumptions about who they are and what the world is like.

Most parents today are somewhere in between these poles, trying to do their best to bring up their children. They have their opinions and behaviors of encouragement or prohibition and handle their children accordingly. But there is one thing they normally overlook: they don’t really connect and accept the present emotional state these children are in, they don’t enter into their perspective, but see things from their own – which necessarily is far more advanced and wide. If they cling to the ideology of ‘no boundary’ they don’t realize the vital need of the young creature to explore its territory and the helplessness and fear which comes up when this territory seems endless, no direction where to go, no goal visible.

Parents who set boundaries and say NO when it needs to be said often disconnect with their children ‘to make them understand better’. This might be their intent when they keep staying in anger, don’t talk to the child for a while or remind him/her over and over again of what he/she has done wrong.  This emotional distance punishes the child in a way that parents are not aware of. Saying NO and being angry at the spot is right. When the emotional response of the child comes up, sadness, tears, then the child needs the reassurance that he is all right as a human being, loved by his parents; that she DID something wrong, but that she IS NOT wrong.

Most of us have grown in an environment where our caregivers did not behave like that: or they didn’t care at all about our emotional responses, or they abandoned us, let us alone in moments of emotional distress with the conviction that we needed to find the way out ourselves – which we were unable to do in a healthy way – and therefore we came up with all kind of believes about ourselves and the world and the people around us. These convictions by the time froze into our sense of identity, they continue to influence or even lead our lives in covert ways during our whole life – if we don’t realize it, what we seldom do, since they have become the water in which fish swim without knowing anything about it.

That’s why there are all these contradictory voices talking in ourselves: if you have ever listened to the dialog which is constantly going on in your head then you have an idea of what I am speaking about: “chocolate is not good for you, only one piece”, “I want the whole chocolate”, “no, don’t do that” “haha, I got another piece, and another – I am a trickster…”

You can see these voices as younger versions of yourself who are still in contradiction with your caregivers who have expressed a prohibition and menaced punishment of some sort. Your childish reaction might have been to rebel openly or covertly, or you have adopted as a fixed rule what those people told you. Your reaction to what came to you from your immediate surrounding became your habit to react to similar situations from then on. And when you were about 12 years old you took over yourself the controlling business, and this inner controller often developed even much more severe and merciless that the actual people who where controlling your behavior so far. By the time you will have   found good rationalizations for why you could or could not do or be what you really wanted to do or be and you always reinforced the original messages on a daily basis.

If you, today, feel at a loss in any area of your life, if you feel unfulfilled, without job or partner, without joy and a sense of the purpose of your life, you can be sure that you are still guided by these covert old identities of your childhood. You might even have an idea of what they are, you have talked with a therapist and some of the crucial situations of your childhood came into light. Now you might know where your difficulties in life come from, who is responsible for the distortions of your childhood experience and understanding. You might have tried to make up for it by allowing this inner child to come out of the closet and to take over the show of your life – in many ways alike the parents who don’t set boundaries for their children. Now what? Did it really change your life, transform it to what you sense would be possible for you? Or are you still blown from here to there between what you think you want now, or now, or now, and what you think you should do instead?

What you can do, now, whatever age you are: find out about these younger parts of you, recognize in them the child you once where who has stopped his or her development in the moment the false belief was adopted fully as truth. Then you can caringly and lovingly help her to grow, to develop, to become mature, to finally leave the pain and the feeling of inadequateness behind. And you do that in the same way as you do it with your own children – if you are a skillful parent for them. You will help them grow by really seeing and acknowledging them, by recognizing their feelings and needs and never dismiss them, negate them or talk them out of what is so for them. And you will give them guidance as to what is ok and what is not and you will decisively, but in a loving  context, make sure that they do what you want. And if it doesn’t make sense to them, then you need to be able to explain it in a way which is appropriate to their age – and, by the way – what you ask from them really needs to make sense and be consistent.

You might find out that all this is much easier for you when you deal with your physical child, but not so easy when you approach your inner child-like being. If so, you might need to reinforce the ‘good parent’ in yourself and also have a look on the interactions with your real child and see if you can improve your beingness with him. You might think that you are a loving and understanding parent, but when you look closer you might find out that you don’t really see and welcome what they are feeling or what they needs from you, that you might only THINK that you are doing 'your best', when you, in reality, are not, not really…..