29 September 2006

Nurturing Your Amazing Kids

I have people write to me and ask questions. This is one that I find really intriguing, so I'm posting the question, and my answer here:

How can I get my child to see that he/she is as amazing as he/she really is?

First of all, I LOVE this question. Here is my answer:

This may sound funny, but I want you to check-in with yourself here and make sure that YOU firmly believe that this child is amazing. I want you to write down every single thing that you can think of that is amazing about your child. I want details - like “a terrific sense of humor,” and “a flair for saying the right thing” and “a gift for giving love” and “a special affection for seniors” and “a unique free throw style” and, well I hope you get the idea. I want everything - and not just physical features that are appealing, I want talents, gifts, the very essence of their heart. I want it ALL and I want it on paper.

Then check-in again. Do you believe this child is amazing? Of course you do! But now that you’re in the moment of really feeling it, it will come through so much better when you talk to your child.

So why doesn’t the child believe? Well, I’m guessing that there have been messages that the child has received that made him or her believe that he wasn’t quite so amazing. And I’m not placing any blame here. The message may not have come from you. It could have come from anyone that has had an influence on the child including TV, grandma, the movies, the neighbor kid, someone on the bus. Doesn’t matter, someone put some doubt in your kid’s head – and there it sits today.

Your job is to help them take what they think to be a truth and reveal to them that it is not a truth, but an opinion of someone who was wrong: dead wrong.

See, we take in things when we’re small and we lock them into our little heads with the best tools we have at the time. We see them as life lessons and we learn from them. What we don’t learn is that some of those lessons aren’t accurate. We need mom and dad to help us discover which lessons were inaccurate. Or we wait until we’re much older and have adult skills and then we uncover them ourselves after years and years of letting them impact us.

I haven’t shared any experiences of my own in this e-book yet, but I will share one now. My husband has told me for years that I am beautiful. For years, I never believed him. Six months ago, I discovered that he was right. Sound crazy to you or maybe egotistical? It’s not meant to be. Not at all. But when I was a kid, my mom would always have me show my pretty new outfits to my dad and say “isn’t she beautiful?” He’d crack one eye over the newspaper and grunt something indiscernible. I figured it meant I wasn’t even worth looking at. And up until 38 years of age, I was convinced that indeed, I was not beautiful.

It wasn’t until I realized that my father was not comfortable providing compliments that I realized that I misunderstood his grunts. It was not that I was not beautiful in my new dress at age 5, it was that he couldn’t tell me that I was beautiful - and there is a very critical difference between how I interpreted it and how it was meant.

But, this isn’t about me. It’s an example for you to show you how even the smallest of reactions can have a long-lasting impact on our self-esteem. And so now you need to search out what may be the underlying cause of your child’s inability to see how amazing he is.

This will take some time and excellent questioning skills played out over many discussions — or if you’re lucky and you sit on her bed in the dark (dark is nice because the pressure is off of the face-to-face parent stuff) on a night she’s willing to share with you, you just may find out in a single discussion. And then you can help her understand how she misinterpreted the message.

And then you can share your list — because now is the perfect time to tell her all the amazing things – because right now, she’s listening and is learning that her old perceptions may have been wrong and that there’s new valuable information to be taken in.

Parents, show your children how amazing they really are. Amazing children grow up to be amazing people and amazing people do amazing things.

My dream is of a world full to the brim – of amazing people.

Thanks for asking!