Your child’s the most essential need
As a single mum with a busy lifestyle and striving to get the best mum award, I struggled to meet all my children’s needs and mine on daily basis, from physical health to emotional health, from education to entertainment. I don’t have enough time and attention daily to accommodate my personal, family, and business commitments.
To ease off some challenges, I learned to prioritize and delegate. I work through my daily list and rate its importance and identify any opportunities to delegate it to others. This practice started my quest to find what my children truly need that cannot be delegated to others. And the answer is emotional fulfillment through unconditional love. Love is one essential need and desire which every kid needs from their parent.
Consider this Masaru Emoto’s rice experiment:
Dr. Emoto placed cooked rice into three containers. On one container, the words Thank You” were written. On the second container, he wrote, “You Fool” while the third container was completely ignored. Children were instructed to speak aloud the words on each jar whenever they walked by them each day. At the end of 30 days, the rice with the words, Thank You” was relatively unchanged while the rice with the words, “You Fool” turned black. The rice in the ignored container began to rot.
Unconditional love is a basic and essential human emotional need, in fact, you can break and kill others’ spirits by taking your love away. Everyone’s deepest desire is to be loved unconditionally no matter what. However, the issue is most people feel that the words UNCONDITIONAL are something huge and unobtainable.
Loving unconditionally means you are willing to love them as who they are and in their imperfect shape. That is love through acceptance, love through affection, and love through attention. Alongside embracing and supporting who they are becoming.
Practicing love through acceptance can be expressed through the following phrases:
1. I love you
I am sure the majority of parents love their children, but how many parents are verbally expressing their love on regular basis? Telling your children that you love them is teaching them the importance of expressing their feelings. This is a life skill training that helps to prevent them from getting into a bad love relationship when they grow up. The main reason for a relationship breakup is that the couple felt unloved.
2. I am proud of you
This phrase will help to form a belief that they are good enough no matter what. It helps them to accept themselves including their weakness, flaws, and mistakes made. One of the main limiting beliefs that every human being on this planet suffers from is not feeling good enough. In the fast-growing era of social media, so many of us compete in appearance, materialism, instant gratification, and happiness. We fall into the trap of “happiness when”, that is a belief that I am happy when…. This belief will drive us into addictive behaviors that offer a euphoric moment in search of happiness like drugs, alcohol, shopping, and more.
3. I hear you
As a child, you were told by your parents to stop expressing your powerful feelings, like crying, having a tantrum, or even screaming out of joy. Those
moments taught you to suppress and refuse to acknowledge your adult emotions. This pattern of behavior will get carried to a relationship, where you will choose not to express your feelings. Then one day, when you cannot bottle them up anymore, you will end up in either the drowning stage or having an emotional outburst. This phrase, I hear you, acknowledges and validates your children’s feelings. When they reach adulthood, they feel safe to express their feelings.
4. I believe in you
Having a fear of the unknown is normal and expected, as our subconscious mind is hard-wired for safety and protection. It requires courage to overcome fear
and, as a child, you are looking for this assurance from your parents or caretakers. However, most parents failed to acknowledge this as they had the experience and no longer regarded it as engendering fear in the child. A simple phrase, like, I believe in you, can help to neutralize your children’s fear.
Joseph Burgo, author of Shame: Free Yourself, Find Joy, and Build True Self-Esteem, defines basic shame as the unconscious awareness of internal damage, felt at the deepest level of our being. The development of basic shame occurs when our parents fail to provide our needs for love, safety, and joy.
The child then adopts the belief ‘I am not good enough as there is something wrong with me.’ The basis of shame is intensified as the deficiency of good enough parenting increases, according to Winnicott, who coined the term good enough parenting. It encompasses the basic active adaptation to meet an infant’s need for empathy while being physically and emotionally available. When a child grows up in a less than good enough environment, she will be more likely to feel an attraction toward an emotionally unavailable life partner. As her brain’s neuroplasticity is wired for safety rather than intimacy; an emulation of her child-parent relationship.
In short, every parent has the best intention for their offspring by trying their holistic needs. Parenting is not a light responsibility to take on. Yet, if I looked back to my early days of parenting (lower self-awareness level), there is one thing that I would have done differently. Focusing to be my children’s guardian role, instead of mothering them. What that means is I allow them to follow their curiosity and explore their world. I would also allow them to choose how they wish to live their life with little nudges of love along the way if I see them heading towards bumps and cliffs.
