Over the years I have observed that Real Love consistently changes people’s lives, especially with children because they haven’t been wounded as much as adults and because they’re still in the process of forming their perspectives about who they are, who other people are, and how they fit in the world.
Why Children in Pain Don't Respond to Real Love
I have seen parents present children to me who are in obvious agony, suffering from whining, anger, defiance, withdrawal, anxiety, ADHD symptoms, depression, suicidal thoughts, failure in school, and addictions to phones, games, social media, and physical appearance. Many of these children have been in therapy, taken medications, and been treated in inpatient facilities.
The solutions I present to the parents are quite simple and consistently effective, as we have outlined in the Ridiculously Effective Parenting Training. So why do children fail to respond to Real Love?
By far the most consistent underlying reason is that parents are AFRAID of their children. Changing the patterns of a lifetime takes real courage. Children tend to resist such changes, and the moment children express discomfort at the changes, most parents fold like a paper sculpture in the rain. They surrender to the first hint of pain.
We parents are so very afraid of that angry, accusatory look our children give us when they feel discomfort and blame us for it. We’re also afraid of other people blaming us for hurting our children.
Suffer a Little Pain Now to Avoid a Lot of Pain Later
But sometimes a little pain now cannot be avoided if we want to solve a big problem later, one accompanied by much worse pain.
As a surgeon I routinely caused people a little pain now to avoid much worse pain later. I didn’t hesitate to pound on someone’s chest and stick needles in them, for example, if it caused their heart to start and prevented death.
And that’s exactly where we often find ourselves as parents. Our children are headed toward emotional heart disease and even possible death, but because they SEEM to be surviving in the moment, we don’t want to cause them any pain that they might blame us for.
We are cowards. I wish there were another name for it, but we’re afraid. I have been in the room when people’s hearts have stopped, and I have seen how timidly inexperienced medical students have administered CPR to the patients.
They don’t have the many experiences of watching people recover from such treatment—often physically violent—so they’re too afraid to cause potential discomfort or injury to a patient who will die without it.
And so it is with parenting. Most of us have never seen the miraculous results of consistent and firm loving and teaching, so we have no faith in the results.
Instead we fear the immediate and minor pain we might cause, and thus we stand by, wringing our hands while our children suffer severe emotional disability and even death.
We have a clear choice: a little pain now or a lot of pain later (or worse). When saving a life requires discomfort, we must have the courage to live with the discomfort we feel and the discomfort we cause. Without such courage, we cannot be real parents.
