Parents and Kids and Families

[AlohaDawg]

OK, so a few of us are parents, all of us are someone's children and we all have some level of dealing with our families. So I'm posting this list of aphorisms, all from one guy who is a sort of guru and famous guy about these sorts of things. Here's what I hope to get out of this thread: pick one that you either vehemnetly agree with or violent disagree with. As gracefully as possible, state your case. I'm sure someone will quickly identify the source. Tiny cans to you when you do.

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You can't be a good parent without being a good spouse.

There are two kinds of parental love: the love you give your kids, and the love you give your spouse. Kids with loving spouses grow up believing in romantic love.

It's your kid's job to resist. It's your job to impose your will.

Good discipline is just another form of love.

Ten percent of life is what happens; the other 90 percent is what you do about it.

Many of us parent out of fear - fear of alienating our kids, fear of making the wrong choice - but fear never leads to the right destination.

You cannot fix your children without also fixing yourself.

The greatest gift a man & a woman can give to their children is the gift of loving each other.

Your marriage is not a facet of your life. It is your life. It is not a detail of your happiness, but its source and greatest blessing. Swallow your pride. Go back to the person to whom you once committed your life and exert the energy to make the marriage work again. By doing so you will have the satisfaction of knowing, not only that you never stopped climbing – that you never quit – but rather that you never climbed alone.

There is enough uncontrollable pain in life without us unnecessarily adding self-inflicted wounds.

The hero is not the man who conquers the world, but who conquers his own passions.

We dare never parent out of fear. Fear is a hysterical reaction to an imagined threat, while caution is a calculated response to a real danger.

We must raise our children to fear none but God alone.

A parent’s bedroom is not a family sitting room or family dormitory. Children should never sleep in their parents’ bedroom. If you need to hire a security guard to make your bedroom into Fort Knox, that is still better than allowing your role as parent to conflict with your role as lover to your spouse.

The rule of relationships is this: We all want to be wanted, need to be needed, desire to be desired. Demonstrating a dependency on the object of your love is the golden rule of relationships.

Man is a force of nature, like a hurricane, whose turbulence is on the extremities but has utter calm at its center. We are powerful when we have shalom, tranquility, in the home, when the place to which we retreat is tranquil. Then, none of the external noise pierces our soul. For many families today, however, they have tumultuous winds in the home, forcing them to flee to mind-numbing escapes on the extremities, outside the home.

It’s not true that a couple’s sex life need end with the advent of children. On the contrary, what is lovemaking other than a man and woman at play, flirtatious and precocious. And the natural playfulness that children inject into the lives of their parents can help them to draw closer.

The greatest gift that a man can give his children is to love their mother. Conversely, the greatest gift that a mother can give her children is to love their father.

By being happily married we gift to our children the knowledge that love works, that the world is comprised of pieces of a puzzle that ultimately fit.

The man who cheats on his wife thinks of himself as an adventurer, when really he is a wanderer.

We dare not make money into a commodity by which to purchase self-esteem.

The foremost sin in a marriage is to put someone (even your child) before each other.

The real purpose of counseling a family is not to point out right and wrong, but to inspire them to choose the right and reject the wrong.

The Garden of Eden was not a place in space, but a place in time. It represents our childhood years, when everything is magical and perfect. Eviction from Eden represents growing up, the natural tendency to be bitten by the hardships and disappointments of life, to calcify and coarsen. The restoration to Eden takes place when we have children, who reintroduce all the lost Eden-like qualities of childhood into our lives.

Parents today are guilty of believing that they can have healthy children without having a healthy family environment.

Most of us promise ourselves that we will never make the same mistakes as our parents, yet we grow up and almost by osmosis, we start becoming them. We end up transmitting to our children the same imperfections that our parents transmitted to us. It’s a never-ending cycle. And there comes a time in the generational life of a family that one generation has to say, "Enough, I will be healed so that my children will heal." Let that generation be us.

You cannot have healthy children without having a healthy family environment.

There are no bad children. Only bad parents. When our kids act up, it’s time to  look in the mirror.

Parents need their children far more than children need their parents.

You are not a hero to the world unless you are first and foremost a hero to your children.

Have you really been successful if the people who mean the most to you, think the least of you?

[wombat]

There are no bad children. Only bad parents. When our kids act up, it’s time to  look in the mirror.

I don't believe that everything that is bad in a person can be blamed on bad parenting.  It's not all nurture - nature plays a role too.  I'm sure that those of you with more than one child have observed that your children have different personalities almost from birth, even though they are equally related to you, are in roughly the same environment, etc.  There's stuff you can't control, and it's a little scary to me that people might even think they can control every aspect of how their children turn out.

Which isn't to say that some stuff shouldn't be blamed on parents.  For instance there is clearly no reason that children visiting a Reptile House at the zoo would need to scream so much if they were properly brought up, oh God don't get me started.  But you don't grow up to be a mass murderer because of bad toilet training either. 

[FlipConstantine]

The greatest gift a man & a woman (or another man/woman, we don't judge) can give to their children is the gift of loving each other.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.  As for fearing God alone, I'm grateful to my parents for instilling in me a healthy fear of Carrot Top, but that's another story all together.

[AlohaDawg]

Well, they aren't my words and I'm confident the original author may not support that edit. But that's a valid comment.

PS Wombat, what's wrong with your reptile house? I've been to the zoo here a LOT and also Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and I never experienced particularly general mayhem in the reptile house.

[Doc]

The greatest gift that a man can give his children is to love their mother. Conversely, the greatest gift that a mother can give her children is to love their father.

I don't feel particularly strongly about any of these, most of them seem reasonably sensible (if a little close minded about the absolute need for a traditonal family environment) but I thought I'd talk a little about this one.

I disagree with it in the strictest interpretation (and from the other statements I believe this is how it is intended)  on the basis that love and support of the children is far more valuable. I think this statement confusesit is true that love between the parents is necessary but rather that acrimony between them is very damaging. While the lack of one often leads to the other they are very much not the same thing.

My parents, while they are still together, have never had the most stable relationship and lived apart for a while. During that time I (and even moreso my brother) had a chance to become much closer to our dad than we had been previously. I'm not saying there was suddenly a miraculous and universal understanding, but a new level of understanding and acceptance was reached between us.  My mother on the other hand was much harder to deal with during this period and I believe that this was in no small part because my dad was basically willing to let their differences go (or at least not bring them up in front of us) while with my mother there was always a bit of tension beneath the surface which would often come out in snide remarks and similar. In her defense she was normally only like this when she was tired but the difference was there.

So, from my own experience, I don't think love between parents is necessary for healthy raising of children. It is desirable certainly but kids are not going to get messed up because their parents don't love each other.  Even parents fighting isn't the end of the world, it's when children feel they have to choose a side that it becomes dicey. Children love their parents naturally and want to please them so a child thinking they need to badmouth one of their parents to please the other is a nasty situation.

It is also worth pointing out that trying to 'make' yourself love someone can be equally as damaging as it will only result in each person blaming the other for the failure of the relationship and in that situation it is fairly inevitable that the children will feel some responsibility too for something that is totally outside of their control.

[wombat]

PS Wombat, what's wrong with your reptile house? I've been to the zoo here a LOT and also Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and I never experienced particularly general mayhem in the reptile house.

Dunno, maybe it's partly the acoustics, but when it get busy the visitors are just REALLY LOUD.

[theinevitable]

A parent’s bedroom is not a family sitting room or family dormitory. Children should never sleep in their parents’ bedroom. If you need to hire a security guard to make your bedroom into Fort Knox, that is still better than allowing your role as parent to conflict with your role as lover to your spouse.

and

The foremost sin in a marriage is to put someone (even your child) before each other.

strike me as strange. I cannot really explain why. It seems that it is necessary to put your children first.

and I just don't like the absolute negative in the first one. obviously the kid shouldn't sleep in your bed every night, but once and a while, it seems acceptable. bad dreams can be scary. it seems much worse to put yourself in the position of rejecting your child when they are at their most vulnerable, than it does to give up a few nights of sex.

[wombat]

I have no experience of this but what I gather from the reports of very tired co-workers is that once people start letting the kid sleep with them, it gets to be really hard to draw the line.  Because, you know, sleeping in the big bed is so much nicer, and evolution has endowed children with the survival skill of being very good at making the sad face and they're not afraid to use it on you.

[AlohaDawg]

I have no experience of this but what I gather from the reports of very tired co-workers is that once people start letting the kid sleep with them, it gets to be really hard to draw the line.  Because, you know, sleeping in the big bed is so much nicer, and evolution has endowed children with the survival skill of being very good at making the sad face and they're not afraid to use it on you.

This is true. Also, I think his points about putting your spousal relationship first makes sense in some ways because if the parents are in an unhealthy relationship,(a) they will be more stressed and it will be that much more difficult to provide a healthy relationship for kids, and (b) given the opportunity to model a healthy, loving relationship to your kids or An unhealthy, loveless relationship to your kids, wouldn't you pick healthy and loving (if you could choose?) Even in the absence of kids, wouldn't you pick that for yourself?

I should point out that the writer is a member of the clergy, so that explains some of the phrasing and emphasis. It's OK in my mind to filter out the bias being a clergyman can bring to the table and phrase these more to your situation if that gives one insight.

[Asherdan]

By being happily married we gift to our children the knowledge that love works, that the world is comprised of pieces of a puzzle that ultimately fit.

Spouse and I buy into this with the addendum that children should also be aware of the general mechanics (specifics are adult private) that go into making a happy marriage. I think children should understand the working framework of successful relationships, if only to give them a point of reference when they begin to construct their own. Also, no relationship is perfect. It's a hell of a comfort to know, with the certainty of a child, that mom & dad will work it out together.

Good discipline is just another form of love.

This is an absolute in my view. Reasoned discipline, with greater explanation and discussion as children age, provides a framework of responsibilities and expectations for both the children and the parents within which teaching can occur. By no means should this be rigid and inflexible, but deviations from standards should generally be for reward or cause. A recent study showed a link between academic performance and a child's ability to execute self control and delayed satisfaction. It may seem kinda 19th century of me, but I buy into the value of developing in children a sense of work ethic and accomplishment, with reason ruling over whim. This is not to say that fun is out of bounds, just that teaching that the days work comes prior to the days fun is important. We do keep this age appropriate, the expectations for the boy have grown with his age, we're not trying to build little adults or curtail childhood fun, but strike a sense of balance between responsibility and free time.

It's your kid's job to resist. It's your job to impose your will.

And they will try to wear you out. I'm a big fan of the power of NO. So are kids, see how quick a 2 year old begins to apply it at every opportunity. Being firm, consistent and dispassionate about the inevitable disagreements goes a long ways towards shortening or avoiding the long running emotional laden cyclones.