In this episode of the Becoming You podcast, I talk about parenting mistakes that you might be making.
Mistake #1: You raise your kids like your parents raised you.
The world we grew up in as children and the world our kids are growing up in are very, very different.
Our parents could shelter us as much as they wanted to from the challenges of the world. Today, with the ease of access everyone has to the internet, no matter how much we try to shelter our children from the harsh realities of the world, we simply will not be able to.
As parents, we need to learn to take cues from our children and engage in dialogue with them instead of simply trying to impose our parental instincts—ingrained in us from our own upbringing—onto them.
Mistake #2: You set extremely high expectations for yourself as a parent, and expect your kids to adhere to those same standards.
You might be like me, and are critical of everything you and others do.
If you’re the perfectionist, overachiever, or doer type, we tend to assume that everyone ought to operate the same way—our kids being no exception.
As with the last point, we need to take note of how our kids are wired and how they regard themselves and the world around them as they grow and mature.
Allow your kids to fall, to fail, and then rise, and learn. This simple process will do more for their personal growth than any expectation approximating perfection ever will.
Mistake #3: You train your kids to suppress their feelings.
One of the worst things we can do as parents is to disregard our children’s feelings or, worst of all, we get angry at them for expressing “unacceptable” feelings, whether it’s anger, disappointment, or shame.
Doing this tells your kids that they are not allowed to feel their big feelings around you—the human beings they trust the most at that point in their lives. This belief stays with them as they age, and it is an incredibly difficult belief to eradicate once it’s set in.
Mistake #4: You tell your kids, ever so subtly, that they need to change who they are.
Many of us have parents that withheld their love for us in very subtle ways if we didn’t behave the way they wanted us to.
The most common way this manifests is through school grades. How many of us were taught to feel worthless by our parents, even if they don’t explicitly mean to do so, whenever we brought home papers marked with less-than-stellar grades?
This communicates to our kids that who they are isn’t good enough and that they aren’t deserving. It plants a seed of insecurity and low self-esteem that, once again, lasts for a lifetime if left unaddressed.
Mistake #5: You believe that your children owe you something.
We don’t own our children, so they don’t owe you anything.
They don’t owe you future wealth or to “uphold the family name”, as great as those things are.
Mistake #6: You tell your kids to “do something useful” whenever they’re at play or rest.
As adults, we are run by time. That’s the unfortunate reality of navigating modern society.
But we should never be the ones to put that burden of being in constant motion, of being endlessly productive, on our own kids.
Mistake #7: You would do anything for your kids save for letting them be themselves.
As parents, we have certain ideas or dreams regarding how we want our kids to turn out.
Career aside, we ultimately want them to be successful, smart, charismatic, and ambitious. And if we don’t see those qualities right off the bat, we start to panic.
Mistake #8: You don’t let your kids fail.
Naturally, it pains us as parents to watch our kids fail and experience those negative emotions.
But as it goes, failure is necessary for growth.
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