Tag Archives: parenting

Ethical Parenting: Finding Out About Love, Starting With Ethics

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What does it mean to Love our children?

 What would love do every moment and in every interaction we have with our partner, with children, with others?

How do we know what love would do?

 Have you heard of ‘The Golden Rule’? A Biblical term referred to by Jesus as, ‘treating others as you would like to be treated’. Notice it is not ‘how you are treated, or how you treat others’ but rather how you would ‘like’ to be treated. Or you could take it one step further and say ‘treat others as God treats me’. This is what I understand ethics (very basically) to be. The beauty of ethics is that it is easy and simple to see based on the above premiss: treat others as you would like to be treated, and in most situations this will give a good indication if you are engaging in a loving manner or not.

For me it is a process of discovery about how God treats me. I am needing to unravel a lot of false beliefs about God and have so far only heard the Truths about God not fully experienced them for myself. So I am beginning with ethics, treating others as I would like to be treated. You can do this with or without God.

What does it mean to parent ethically?

I feel we have a heap of double standards as adults especially with children. If we asked of ourselves what we ask or demand of our kids I can guarantee we would be outraged. We would feel controlled, belittled, interrupted, confined, isolated, shamed, unimportant, ignored, entitled, and probably a heap of other things not mentioned here that you probably felt yourself as a child.

I notice often that I treat kids differently to adults.

Grownups when I was a kid said things they didn’t mean, they lied and hid behind ‘nice’ facades which are not really that nice, sometimes downright terrifying. They said one thing and meant another, they didn’t explain, were dishonest and said they knew or would do things when they didn’t, wouldn’t or forgot, they made promises they couldn’t keep. Kids got in the way, were not as important as adults, didn’t get the same attention. They didn’t know what love was because they had been mis-informed and mis-educated about it also. Sometimes I wonder why people have kids if they don’t want to love them, but it seems there are many parents having kids for other reasons than love.

 I realise what I say could be very confrontational. I feel it is true though. I have been looking at my own reasons for having children, they were not pure and to love the children unconditionally. I am having to learn how to love and grow a sincere desire to want to love. I have had a screwed up version of love and a screwed up perception of parenting and I am going through a process of re-education. It feels uncomfortable often and I am coming to terms with the fact that I have not wanted to love. Rather I have wanted to be loved, to be cared for, to be seen as a ‘good mum’. I have wanted the children to demonstrate ‘good’ things about me because I have felt so bad inside of myself.

I feel sad about this because it means I have not allowed the children to just be themselves and love them for it. I have demands, expectations and investments in them. I want from them, rather than to give to them. I have manipulated, moulded and groomed them into what I want them to be, to fit my mould, rather than what God created them to be as they are.

At first I didn’t want to see what I had done. I was in a lot of denial (still am on certain issues and subjects). There are many ways to justify, minimise, deny what we have created and what we do as parents, but honestly we need to get real, get honest and see where we are unethical, where we are out of line in the treatment, especially of children, but also our partners and our brothers and sisters (other people) in general.

Many people think it is okay to shame, condescend to, belittle, hit, hurt, abuse, rage at, violently treat children to varying degrees or under certain circumstances. We say it is ‘for their own good’, ‘we have their best intentions in mind’, often we even say it is because we ‘love’ them. We blame children and excuse ourselves for all sorts of hurtful actions, not seeing that it is us who our children are reflecting in the first place and we are punishing them because we don’t want to be reminded and feel our own pains and hurt parts. It is us who children mirror and they highlight our lack of love.

Children learn so amazingly. They lean quickly and they learn from feelings not words. They reflect our true feelings not the ones we want everyone, including ourselves to believe are true about us (our facades – what we want to believe we are rather than what we actually are at this point in time).

We are responsible, we create so much of the pain in our children’s lives*** – especially when they are very young (as they get older they act out upon the injuries created by us and use their will either in harmony with love or out of it – often dependent on what we taught them until they learn or discover otherwise. Even so their actions come from things that we did to them in the first place, because we chose not to forgive our parents for their actions.), we create it by not allowing our own pain to flow and be released. We create it by suppressing our children, by teaching them to be what we want them to be, rather than be who they are as God created them. We teach our children that they are not okay as they are, they need to be something else – something we approve of, and they do that, or they rebel which ever will cause us to feel the most, and often instead of being humble and feeling our feelings we suppress and punish the child some more. What we need to do is to feel. To own how we feel as we feel it and to feel it responsibly, without taking it out on another soul. It is that simple. Feel and heal – without involving your kids, without involving others, just you and God, if you desire. That is how it is done.

We teach children that parental approval is love. I am saying it is not. Parental approval is nothing in comparison to love, it is a substitute and a poor substitute at that, and yet even as adults we are striving for it rather than seeing that the how we would like to be treated and what we would like to feel (love) from others is mostly not what we are receiving.

 

I feel that a massive, world wide, re-education program is needed that begins with Love – God’s version not ours. We need to re-educate ourselves with God’s Truth rather than the lies our parents and environment taught us as kids and the lies we continue to tell ourselves as grown ups, reinforcing our erroneous childhood educations, that keep us locked up as damaged children. We need to re-educate ourselves first and automatically this will educate our children about God’s Love and God’s Truth through example rather than theory.

If we really want to love we can begin with ethics, we can begin with treating our children as we would ‘like’ to be treated. We can stop controlling them and begin to love them. We can stop shouting at them and withholding approval of what they do or don’t do and be soft with them, teach them about love, self discovery, self responsibility and ethical behavior themselves.

We need to do this through our actions and behaviour not our words. Words are cheap and meaningless when they don’t match the real feelings coming out of us. Being honest, truthful and real is important for real relationships and friendships. To be ethical we are going to need to first be honest and see what we are doing, how we treat others and ourselves and be honest about how it actually feels. So-often we are conditioned to accept unloving behaviour and we come to feel it is ‘normal’ or ‘the only way’ or even the ‘right way’ I am suggesting there is another way (God’s Way of Love) and that we can start right now, with a first step being by simply practicing and treating others as we would like to be treated.

That means stop blaming others, including your children for your own personal pain. For example, stop getting angry at children and own your feelings as yours, find out why you are angry and what you are angry about. I guarantee that you you don’t enjoy people shouting at you, punishing you, condescending to you, controlling you, having double standards and telling you lies so why are we doing it to others, especially children. Children are honest with us, until they are taught otherwise, so why are we not honest with them?

I am noticing that how I was treated as a child is often how I treat children and it is only as I soften to the hurts within me that I am discovering that naturally and without effort I begin to treat our children and others more softly, acceptingly, compassionately. While I am hard and punishing with myself I am also hard and punishing with others.

I encourage you to explore your own behaviours and how you treat your children, I encourage you to be real and self reflective no matter how painful it feels and find out the truth of what you feel, feel it without harming others or yourself and your life will change if you are doing this sincerely. It is beautiful and a gift to both yourself, your children and those around you.

Give it a go, experiment, discover, explore ethics and see what you discover…

* For more information on Ethics and Morality go to the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mybby95f3vs

 ** I say ‘your’ children, though I would like to suggest that they do not belong to you at all, but are rather God’s children and your brothers and sisters. I find it helpful to think about this as I treat brothers and sisters very differently to children who I feel I ‘own’. Children are not property, though we have for many generations believed and told them they are. Children are not to be owned, enslaved, brought or sold. Rather children are a perfect gift born from desire and are the most amazing creation and perfect reflection of our soul condition, where we are at and the areas that we need to heal in love. They are a blessing and a gift and our only ‘job’ is to teach them about Love, God’s Truth and God’s Love, God Herself, and allow and enable them to discover for themselves…

***We harm children by mis-educating them about Love, Truth, God and not being truthful about so many subjects. Including not being truthful  about our own feelings and thoughts, creating addictions with children, demanding and expecting of them, inhibiting their freewill and not correcting unloving behaviours in a loving way.

Parents have a lot to answer for. I am also beginning to get glimpses though of what an incredible gift being a parent is and if we ‘parented’ more as God intended it would be friggen awesome all round – that is what I aspire to and get excited about! Children are a gift and a very fast way to learn about love, if you are willing and have a sincere desire to love, in a real way.

Mother, you had me

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Notes Along The Way

Some resources for those wishing to heal in regards to their relationship with their mother:

Click on the underlined grey text below to follow the links.

Mother ‘love’ photo collection

Book Excerpt

“Cultural norms – backed up by the Judeo-Christian tradition -require us to honor our mothers and fathers and, above all, speak no ill of them. These cultural strictures affect all daughters, including those raised by essentially loving, if occasionally imperfect, mothers. They can get in the way of the work a daughter needs to do when she moves from one stage of her own development to another – from adolescence to young adulthood and then into adulthood and motherhood, for example – and must confront the task of seeing her mother wholly and realistically. Our cultural unwillingness to challenge the idealization of motherhood combined with the injunction against criticizing our own mother can leave any daughter unable to…

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‘sMothers’

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Thoughts of mine on Mothers or ‘sMothers’:

I have been thinking about ‘mothers’ and what a mother is. What did God intend the role of a mother/parent to be? I have been thinking about the ideal that I have about a mother and the reality of my own experiences – of my own (surrogate) mother/s and being a ‘mother’ myself and how different they have been to what I thought and anticipated. I have also been noticing in myself how reluctant I have been to share my feelings and thoughts honestly about mothers, mothering and how I feel. 

I see how far removed I am, and I feel general society is from what I have heard about God’s intentions and design of mothers and the family structure. (I would like to know more in my heart about what  parenting as God intended is like, and how God truly designed it to be in a state of Divine Love and Divine Truth. I feel the first step would be to actually get to know my True Parent and Creator God personally).

I feel that as a generalisation there are ‘Smothers’, ‘neglecters’ or a combo of both. (I am sure that other people have written screeds of intellectual information on all of these things. I merely have a few thoughts and feelings of my own about it from my own experience. Many of these have been angry, disappointed, disillusioned, deeply sad – which are still there to work through, and more). 
 
I feel that many women (including myself) who think they are ‘mothers’ should really be called ‘smothers’ because they don’t really allow the little soul’s in their care to be themselves, grow as God intended them too or allow the child’s own free will. It is sort of like ‘mothers will’ and then you will get approval or what often is thought of as ‘love’. 

‘Mothers’ I feel have quite a bit to examine if they were open to it and then see how that actually affects the children. (Probably fathers do also. I talk of mothers as I speak of myself in this post, my own experiences and my experience of ‘mothers’ but maybe where one reads ‘mother/s’ you could substitute ‘parent/s’ ‘caretakers’ – because often they are taking not giving).
 
In my own experience I have at times felt overpowered and smothered by my mother’s anger, fear, expectations, demands, investments, needs, neediness and being made liable for many of her emotions. I have also seen the immediate results of myself doing this with the children in our care – almost identically (though I wish I could say I was different, I am not). I have experienced feeling neglected. Feeling like I had no-one I could share painful experiences with, no one to listen to me, no one to protect me or care for me, that what I said, did, or was, was of no importance or significance to anyone, that I was embarrassing and shaming. This may not be how others saw it but this is what it felt like for me as a child. I have also had this reflected to me by ‘our’* children.
 
I have been reflecting on this feeling of being a ‘good mother’ and how I use it to hide just how bad I feel about myself and what a ‘bad mother’ I actually feel I am. I demand emotionally from people, and especially from the children in our care, and set up a facade of being a ‘good mother’ to hide how I truly feel about myself. I am highly invested in ‘our’ children and examining this brings to light all sorts of interesting discoveries for me about myself (many of which I do not like, judge, and really don’t want to be part of me. As an observer I think they are be most interesting as they basically highlight why I behave as I do).
 
This is an addiction and a damaging place to live (‘I’m a good mother’ place, it is also demanding and angry) I am just wanting everyone to tell me how good I am to avoid the real feelings that come up of feeling so terrible and like such a ‘bad’ mother/bad person. I project out to the world ‘think I am a great mum’ in order to get approval, feel like I have a ‘job’ a ‘worth and get attention for something that really I did not create and that I actually have no idea how it was created. I mean if you think about it, I had sex and that was it. I didn’t actually ‘do’ anything else to make a child. God created it to happen so beautifully, seamlessly and effortlessly, it is truly a miracle. 
 
God took care of the whole thing and no person (I know of) actually fully understands and knows how a baby is created and why the body does what it does and how it does it. We know a few things but really have no idea. We can’t replicate it and yet we feel we are super intelligent. I don’t doubt when we are as God made us that we are super intelligent (though often we don’t act like we are in our current conditions) but I do feel we have a lot of arrogance to claim we know more than our creator about things. God knows best. God always has known best and always will know best, that’s just the way it is**, God made us, it’s logical she would. 
 
From what I understand (intellectually) God is our real parent and as a parent on the earth plane I am but a ‘surrogate’, my role really being only to disclose what I have learnt about God’s version of Love and Truth and God, and convey what I have learnt on ‘How to connect to God…’ to the little souls in our care and then they will have the tools to discover the rest***. (I think there is a really great FAQ question session on Parenting coming up on the Divine Truth YouTube FAQ channel if you are interested I know it will be worth a look!!!)
 
I am experimenting with this at the moment and finding it challenging to my own belief systems, my opinion of myself and how I view what a ‘good mother’ is and ‘should’ be. The self examination and self reflection also brings much joy for me. I think for the first time in the children’s lives they are allowed to be themselves a little bit once in a while. I feel that I am still interfering a lot, allowing spirits to interfere a lot and notice when I put damage and beliefs into them often immediately now. It is pretty amazing how transparent the process is when I want to see the affect I am having on them. 
 
And wow do they learn fast, both (as I judge) ‘positively’ and ‘negatively’! They grow when they are loved and learn tactics to avoid punishment, rejection, pain or things that will make mum angry or ‘upset’ when not loved. They actually now tell me blatantly that they feel no love from me. Or that I am ‘not listening’, angry, or that I love this one or that one more and I can see how they feel that. I see how my actions show them these things.
 
Recently I was writing to a friend that had made some lovely comments about his children and I felt sad that it is not always how I feel about having the gift of three beautiful souls in our care. I was reflecting that if I had allowed myself to be more real and spent some time truly getting to know myself I think I might have waited a while until I had children in order to be more open to loving and giving to them because I desired to love and give to them, rather than take, need, demand, expect and smother them. 
 
I have not really enjoyed being a mother/parent to be totally honest. It is not as I imagined it to be and it has been really challenging. It has not been ‘perfect’ and it has highlighted a whole lot of stuff that is not ‘nice’ in me and that does not fit the facade and opinion I had created of myself for myself and for others. 
 
I remember vividly being pregnant and how ‘wonderful’ I thought that was because I got so much attention for having a life growing in me. I was ‘loved’, a kind of ‘pregnant goddess’, I felt I had a superiority to others because ‘I was having a baby that was mine‘, a desire in me for the whole world to know I was pregnant and how ‘important’ I felt because of it. I was about to become a ‘real’ woman, a true ‘female’. 
 
I cringe remembering these feelings and I still have a grief in me about when our first little darling emerged into the world and everyone ‘smothered’ her and I felt totally ignored. I cried. I felt sorry for myself. I felt lonely and ‘used’. I had thought becoming a mother would change my life into a perfect 1950’s movie script and somehow make me more important or more of a woman or more something and it did none of those things. I was still the same but with a baby to love and care for. I was overwhelmed – how could I love a babe when I hated myself and wanted everyone to love and care for me?**** I was being abruptly confronted with myself, my real motivations, intentions, feelings, thoughts and belief systems about a whole heap of things that before I had been able to strategically avoid through various methods. I decided to continue to avoid and jump out of body, sleep and ‘get away’ as much as possible. I demanded those around me care for me and the new soul in the world.
 
In the last couple of months I feel I am beginning to enjoy having children more and more – finally. To be honest it has taken a while (years) and examining my motivations has been pretty confronting (this has only just begun and I have a long way to go and much to heal from the actions I have taken). I did not have the children to just love and give to and aid them in anyway I can to guide them to learn, grow and know God if they want to. I did have children for very selfish reasons and to fill ‘gaps’ and make me feel loved, special, wanted, important, to meet my demands and so on. 
 
I have what feels like a lot to feel through in these areas but some things have shifted and I am enjoying the children more and releasing some of the desire I have for total control in order to avoid my fear. I am still fearful, angry, and very controlling, realizing that it is about me not them and if I can own that, then it seems to have a more positive affect upon them ( I am also seeing how much my fear and willingness to honour it harms them, literally, emotionally, spiritually etc). They challenge many things in me constantly – naturally, smile – Charlie brought me a baby snake thinking it was a lizard. They ask me about death, about what happens if you get shot, about why people want to kill each other, animals or themselves. They ask where God lives, what God looks like and how God created everything along with a whole heap of other questions to which I do not know the answers. 

They show me their ‘flying’ underpants in the wind grinning; wombat testicles that look like love hearts; rainbow lizards; miracles in God’s garden that I have overlooked. They tell me about the magic and their dreams – to fly, to have every kind of animal, bird, reptile, creature you can imagine, that is alive, extinct, endangered all living in our garden;  every flower in the whole world. To have EVERYTHING and all of it, and the beauty is they believe it is possible (Which it is, but I have cynicism, anger, fear and grief – I suspect, to work through about it too), the children are unlimited in their desires. They remind me to believe and dream and giggle at things, to notice the small creatures and the feeling inside myself in the moment. They expose my fears literally. Fear is a pretty powerful emotion for creating ‘negative’ effects, more work and messy situations, of which I have experienced and still do regularly and will until I release the fear I suspect.
 
Children are reflectors and show up immediately anything that we (parents and the environment around them) are denying, avoiding, unaware of. I have found this frustrating, confronting and pretty helpful as I can see now that they are not ‘bad’ or ‘behaving badly’ or that there is anything ‘wrong’ with them. If I can just own my stuff I notice they express themselves and then head off and play. If I choose to remain in denial they seem to expand in what ever they are doing (generally what I feel to be negative – like demanding or fighting or hitting each other etc to show me my injuries and how I am out of harmony with love and truth in that moment. Sometimes it might be due to me being ‘off with the fairies’ (as mum used to say) or out of body, when I am self punishing, or avoiding how I really feel and going into guilt instead. Guilt is really fear and in my experience it brings about ‘fearfilled’ situations such as the children falling over, or being physically hurt.) and it just goes down the crapper very rapidly.
 
I feel strongly that there are ways to bring up children differently to our own experiences. I believe we are able to love them and be truthful with them as God is with us. I believe if we are willing to be self reflective, self examining, willing to FEEL, look at the emotional investments we have in our children, own our emotions rather than projecting them and feel through all the pain and hurt we have experienced or done to others (forgive and repent); and if we treat everyone including children as we would like to be treated (even if we just did this one thing and stayed present/in our bodies all the time no matter what I feel it would change a whole heap of things!), we can change the world rapidly and ensure generations of children who FEEL really loved. Children who can easily know God personally if they want to or may automatically because they will be open to feeling, will receive divine love and live the principles of God’s Love and Truth from conception. How different our world can be! How exciting it is that it is possible!*****
 

* I always find it interesting how I refer to the children in our care as OUR children, like I own them and they BELONG to me. I actually feel that they do belong to me, and I have some kind of ‘rights’ over them often. It is frequently demonstrated in how I act towards them and the decisions I make involving them. I have been corrected and intellectually know that actually we are all God’s children and every other soul on the planet is our brother and sister but how often do I REALLY TRULY feel this?
 
**Really we ought to stop arguing, get out our note pads, pay attention and learn as much as we possibly can from the entity that created us because I feel it is safe to assume that my creator would know more about me than I do at this time so why not ask and find out the ‘fast’ way.
 
*** I feel that our role as surrogate parents is to guide children by demonstrating what we know about God’s Laws, and God’s Version of Love and Truth. I feel as a general rule if we treated our children as we would like to be treated and gave them scope to discover the world and God for themselves I feel this would be really great. I don’t agree with ‘freerange’ parenting. I have tried it and it does not teach a child about love or truth, it creates in my experience an opening for a lot of mischief and spirit influence and an excuse for me as the parent to take no responsibility for anything at all. I feel that there are consequences for every action we take – loving or unloving, and God has a beautiful system that teaches us this. We can also show children how this Feedback system works through our own actions. (I think the above is true, but I am hypocritical in my actions. I think I have been told the above rather than felt it in my heart at this time.)
 
**** To be honest I feel this is one of the reasons I actually had a child was to feel loved by somebody because I didn’t feel that. I feel that this is a demand that many parents have on their children and it causes a lot of damage for the child throughout their lives. I believe we as the parents are the ones supposed to love and give to the children around us and in our care, it is up to us to give to them not demand them to give to and love us. If they desire to love us what a beautiful gift but they actually don’t have to love us or do what we say or be what we want them to be, yet I know in myself I expect many of these things, in fact I often DEMAND them. In my opinion there is something that I need to look at here and explore and work through so that the children in our care can be ‘free’ of their mother and make their own decisions based on God’s (their true parent) version of Love and Truth (if they desire).
 
***** For your interest and information, some really great information on parenting that I have found most helpful can be found at: http://www.divinetruth.com  go to > Downloads > Audios and Videos Indexed > 20090307 Human Relationships – Parenting Children S1 & 20090308 Human Relationships – Parenting Children S2, There is an outline, audio and video file. Also keep checking out the YouTube FAQ page as there is an interview on Children and Parenting coming up and should be posted soon which I have no doubt with be awesome and could be challenging.
  

Thoughts on Children

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I have been thinking about children a lot lately and the role of being a ‘parent’. From what I understand God is our real parent and I am but a ‘surrogate’, my role really being only to disclose what I have learnt about Love and Truth and God, or maybe it is even less than that. Maybe if I just convey to the little souls ‘How to…,’ ‘How to connect to God…’ then they will discover the rest. This is obviously quite difficult if I have not learnt to do this myself and if it is not in my heart and I am merely holding it in my head. Also there is a problem if I do not feel this myself (which to be honest personally I do not – yet). 
 
Often I feel that I am the ‘god’ in our house and that children should do what I say, when I say, how I say, immediately and without questioning me. This is pretty unreasonable behaviour when I reflect upon it and something I feel I would rebel about or seriously question if it was happening to me, so why do I expect it from the little ones in my care? Why are they any different to me? Why do boss them round, yell at them and often treat children ‘less than’? A good question. 
 
I feel there are a lot of illogical, untrue beliefs around children, both now and historically children have been abused, violently treated, and very badly harmed*. To be honest I feel children often still are being treated in this way. Some of the behaviours I have observed in myself and other parents would not be accepted if they were done to adults or if a ‘stranger‘ did them, but due to the fact that the ‘parent‘ did it is deemed okay. 
 
I feel that there is a problem with this. 
 
I also feel that the only way it is going to be any different is if we begin to take personal responsibility for our actions, be VERY truthful with ourselves about how we actually feel, what we believe and what we think we are allowed to do with a ‘parent’ title. I also feel that it is going to be absolutely essential to choose Love, and by love I mean love God’s way. 
 
I feel we need to choose to love and to give (God’s way) and to allow the pain that is within us to be expressed without projecting it on others, including our children. We also need to stop making others liable for our own unhealed emotions and to actually own them ourselves, trace them to their source /cause and take personal responsibility for what we have chosen to do in response to what was done to us and what happened to us. We need to choose Love and Peace over violence (choose love over fear and anger, and choose to stand up to violent persons lovingly). Though I do not practice this wholeheartedly -yet- I believe it is possible and I believe that it has the possibility to change the entire world.
 
We are the only ones that can allow our own personal pain out and we are the only ones that can be sorry and repent the harm and pain that we have put into and caused others. 
 
Really unless we are willing to forgive those that have hurt us and to truly be sorry towards those we have hurt, the cycles are going to continue. I do not claim to be an expert at this or even to have engaged this process fully yet. 
 

I am experiencing first hand how the cycle continues though, and no matter how hard I ‘try’ to be different or just act differently to what I experienced and what happened to me as a child, I notice I am re-creating it due to the fact that ‘trying’ doesn’t make a difference. The feelings, beliefs, emotions that are in me dictate the outcome positive and negative. The cause creates the effect and if I do not release the cause the effects are going to be the same. And I am noticing this is true in my life at this time!

 
I feel when I was growing up there was a certain exceptions and a ‘code of behaviour’ that I was expected to conform to. This was set up by my surrogate parents who felt they ‘knew best’. If I did not follow the ‘rules’ there were various ‘negative’ feeling consequences, often punishments. I am also guilty of setting up a similar paradigm with the children in our care of which I am not proud and am endeavoring to change. Though I can see a pattern which seems intergenerational to me, I do not feel it is ‘right’. In fact I can see how flawed and unkind it is, I personally feel how damaging it was. I feel it can be different and it can be changed in a positive direction and in a couple of generations if we truly desired it. I feel there is a different way to be, a different way to ‘parent’.  Just because ‘that has been the way it has always been’, does not mean that is has to be the the way it is or will be! I believe that it can change if we have the courage to look at ourselves as ‘parents’ and what is really going on within ourselves and between us, our partners and the children in our care.
 

From what I have observed children FEEL, rather than grasp intellectual concepts and thoughts (especially when small). The idea of ‘do what I say, not what I do’ does not work. Children are feeling beings not thinking beings**(when they are very small). As they grow older and are conditioned by their environment often they learn to be otherwise and for myself I became very intellectual to avoid the painful feelings that were inside of me. Unfortunately this has also stunted the joyous feelings too. 

 
What I realise also though is that children are a gift. If I am willing to be humble, open and learn I can discover a huge amount about myself and the unloving emotions that are within me. They expose those rapidly and with precision – if you want to know.
 

I look forward to getting to a place of just loving the little souls in our care for the sole reason that they are a gift and totally beautiful beings! Not because I want things from them, emotionally, physically, addictivly etc.  

 
There is so much to love about children and learn from them. I love their excitement, watching them discover and learn stuff, they are naturals at that! I am realising how much I  can learn from them if I can put my ‘I’m an adult and supposed to know more than you’ belief aside. Really it is being humble to being taught by them rather than the other way round. I would like to be as open, forgiving, accepting, loving, humble as they are again! I feel I’ve really grown down not up, smile.

 

I often feel I have more to learn from the Children in our care than I have to ‘teach’ them. If I was truly humble and owned my unhealed emotions rather than projecting them all upon the children, I feel it would be a much more enjoyable process for both them and myself.

 

The kids love going on adventures, they are pretty keen explorers and discoverers and are constantly finding ‘new’ species (new to them and often to me, smile). Quite amazing when you think about the process of our being, everything happens a first time, like discovering actually never ends, there is always something we do not know, we have not seen, we do not understand…. To actually embrace that wholeheartedly, that would be a place I would like to be! To be childlike with the children in our care! What a gift, what an honor, what an adventure if I choose to truly embrace that!!!
 

 

* Robin Grille’s book Parenting for a Peaceful World gives some enlightening information about ‘the history of’ childhood.
 
** I am beginning to feel we all actually are feeling beings if were more in touch with how God intended us to be. I have heard that God made us to be totally feeling beings and experience everything through feeling. I feel for myself I have learnt to deny my feelings, to justify, intellectualize, minimise and numb out from what I really feel in order to ‘fit in’ and be ‘accepted’. Often people encourage others to feel ‘but only so much’ and ‘only for so long’ and ‘only certain emotions that don’t make me feel uncomfortable.’ In my experience there are a lot of ‘rules’ and beliefs around feelings sometimes those differ depending on the environment that you grew up in.