Our job as parents is to love and teach, and the end result is a child who feels FREE, without fear, and able to make decisions instead of just reacting to pain. Children who feel free, and who are loving and responsible, are always happy. Freedom and joy.
Timestamps:
00:00 Real goal as parents is to loveandteach.
02:04 Children need to learn the laws of happiness.
04:09 Worry communicates incompetence.
06:19 Teaching children The Law of Choice gives them freedom.
Transcript:
Envision your child as a bird. They begin as an egg, and in that condition, there’s not much they can do. You don’t throw an egg out of the nest and hope things work out. You have to make virtually all the decisions in the beginning, and then gradually you teach them the lessons that will enable them to fly.
With love we set them free, to fly without fear. But we also teach them—loveandteach, remember?—the rules of the air. We teach them about gravity, and wind currents, and waves, and how to use their wings and flight feathers, and how to fly in the dark, and how to deal with predators.
Laws of Happiness Essential to Freedom and Joy
Knowledge of these laws is essential to flying with freedom and joy. In human life, these laws are called the Laws of Happiness. Children have to learn, for example, that anger is never, ever compatible with freedom and joy. Without that lesson, they will have endless problems with flying.
They will have the same seriousness of problems if they have a lack of responsibility and more.
As we love and teach, we also must remember that we don’t determine whether each child is a sparrow or hawk. They have their own unique set of innate gifts and abilities, as we discussed in the Parenting Training, but we can teach them how to develop their gifts and to avoid the controlling of people who would try to change who they are.
Moreover, we can show them with our own lives what fearless flying looks like. Again, the goal is freedom and joy.
Worry, Concern & "Care" Stop Freedom and Joy
I’m about to share with you a concept very difficult for most parents to understand. It is almost universally accepted that a “good parent” should be “concerned” for their children.
We worry if they get bad grades. We worry if they’re unhappy. We worry that they’ll get hurt or do the wrong things, so we say things like, “be careful, get down from there, stop that, go slower, don’t run, wear your coat.”
Sure, we have to teach them how life works so they can be happy, but the worry and concern are NOT helpful. If I worry about a child, I communicate the following, whether I mean to or not:
- You are so incompetent that I’m worried about you making good decisions.
- You have to be hypervigilant all the time about bad things happening to you.
- There is something wrong with you.
- You can’t handle anything without my close supervision.
- You need to be protected.
- You are weak.
Again, we don’t mean to communicate those things, but worry and concern are just synonyms for fear, and a child who is surrounded by fear can’t feel freedom and joy.
So now you’re ready for the difficult concept I mentioned:
We must care very much about our children, but we cannot care about their individual choices or mistakes.
We CAN’T care, because “care” is almost universally a sneaky way of saying “worry.” If you visibly care about a child’s grade on a test, for example, the child feels as though your concern for the grade surpasses your genuine love for THEM—and they’re usually right.
Freedom and Joy Comes from Loving and Teaching
So freedom comes from loving and teaching our children—that’s our JOB—not from controlling them, which is what we’re doing when we’re worried about them (which we call caring) and constantly telling them what to do.
Are there any exceptions to not caring about their individual decisions? Sure, we wouldn’t let them drive drunk, because the price is too high. Or play kickball on the highway.
But we HAVE to not care about most individual decisions because that is how they learn. It’s how they learn freedom and joy.
Your children are birds. They need to fly. They need to feel freedom and joy. The rules we teach them are only to help them fly better and not be injured unnecessarily, but we are not here to control them or protect them from everything.
We’re here to love them and teach them how to fulfill their gifts and to feel freedom and joy.
