Children Are from Heaven: Positive Parenting Skills for Raising Cooperative, Confident, and Compassionate Children

THE IMPORTANCE OF MANAGING FEELINGS

The most important element of learning to manage negative emotions is to make them acceptable. Although negative emotions are not always convenient or pleasant, they are a part of growing up. By first learning to express, feel, and release negative emotions, children eventually gain an inner awareness of their feelings and can more easily feel and release negative emotions without having to act them out in any manner.

By learning to feel and communicate negative emotions, children most effectively learn to individuate from their parents (they develop a strong sense of self) and gradually discover within themselves a wealth of inner creativity, intuition, love, direction, confidence, joy, compassion, conscience, and the ability to self-correct after making a mistake.

All the skills of living that make a person shine in this world and achieve great success and fulfillment come from staying in touch with feelings and being able to let go of negative feelings. Successful people fully feel their losses, but they bounce back because they have the ability to let go of negative feelings. They are able to manage their negative feelings without having to suppress them or get lost in them.

Most people who do not achieve personal success are either numb to their inner feelings, make decisions based on negative feelings, or just remain stuck in negative feelings and attitudes. In each case, they are held back from making their dreams come true. To stay in touch with your inner passion and your power to get what you want and need in life, it is essential fully to feel. Positive parenting techniques gradually teach your children to manage their inner negative emotions and to create positive emotion.

Passion means intense feeling. Passion can be sustained in life if we are able to manage our negative emotions successfully. If we learn to suppress our negative emotions, we gradually lose touch with our ability to feel positive emotions as well. We lose our ability to feel love, joy, confidence, and inner peace.

Failure is inevitable in life when adults make decisions or take action based on negative emotions. A successful adult needs to learn how to feel negative emotions and then release them. As a result, positive feelings return, and they are then ready to make healthy and more successful decisions.

LEARNING TO MANAGE FEELINGS

Negative emotions are always okay, but they must be expressed at the appropriate time and place. It is not acceptable for a child to dominate the family with demanding emotional tantrums. Parents must be strong, but at the same time create opportunities for children to have the tantrums they need to have.

Young children need to be expressive and to communicate their negative emotions. By being empathetic and giving time outs, wise parents provide their children with regular opportunities to feel and express their negative emotions fully. Although it is not okay to act out from negative emotions, it is the parents’ responsibility to control the child’s behavior while also making it safe for the child to express negative feelings. When parents use the positive parenting skill of listening and time out, children gradually learn to regulate and manage when, how, and where their emotions are expressed and communicated.

Although it is fine to express negative emotions, it is not acceptable to act them out or express them anywhere and in any situation. It is appropriate to express negative emotions when a parent can and is willing to listen or during a time out. Gradually children learn to regulate their need to express at times when parents can listen.

With regular time outs from two to nine years old, children will gradually learn how to regulate when and how to communicate negative feelings. Though this may seem like a long wait, it is not. Most adults who come for counseling (and many more who don’t) have still not learned how to manage emotions successfully.

To regulate children’s tantrums, a parent needs to give regular time outs. If a parent doesn’t give enough time outs, children inevitably will act out at times when it is not easy or possible to give a time out. With this awareness of the importance of expressing emotions to release them, parents are more willing to listen to their child’s negative emotions and give regular time outs. They clearly recognize that children need to throw tantrums in the appropriate setting of a time out. They no longer feel the need to placate them to avoid confrontation and tantrums.

When positive parenting skills are used, children learn that it is okay to express negative emotions, but mom and dad are still the bosses. When the parent determines that it is time to finish a negotiation, it is time to stop expressing. If a child can’t stop expressing, then a time out will enable a child to release her feelings behind a door. As we have already explored in Chapter Eight, within a few minutes, a child will express and feel the necessary emotions of anger, sadness, and fear and automatically come back to feeling more in control and cooperative.

COPING WITH LOSS

Children tend to have more intense emotions than adults do, because they do not develop the ability to reason until they are nine years old. They cannot reason away their emotions. If someone is mean to them, they feel temporarily that everyone will always be mean to them, or that they somehow deserve to be treated that way, and they will always be treated that way.

They don’t have the reasoning capacity to realize that one person being mean doesn’t mean everyone will be mean.

They can’t reason that if someone is mean to them it may have nothing to do with them at all. It could be that person is just having a bad day. Since they don’t have the ability to reason, their feelings of loss are much greater.

Often parents unknowingly wound their children by minimizing their feelings of loss. One of the best ways for parents to empathize is simply to accept that when children are upset, there are valid reasons for their upsets from their perspective.

Trying to talk them out of their feelings is not necessary. By simply allowing children to express their emotions, they can feel better and then be receptive to reasonable reassurance.

Most adults today understand that to cope with a great loss, feelings of anger, sadness, fear, and sorrow are not only natural, but lead us to feeling better. When we don’t get what we want or we lose someone or something special, sometimes we just need to have a good cry. Feeling and then releasing negative emotions helps us to accept life’s limitations. Likewise, to learn to accept the limits their parents impose, children need to have a good tantrum. Regular tantrums are the way young children express and thereby feel their negative emotions.

Eventually, they learn to feel inside without expressing or acting out their negative feelings.

Regular tantrums are normal and natural up to the age of nine. If children do not have the opportunity to throw enough tantrums, instead of outgrowing this phase of development, they continue to throw tantrums for the rest of their lives. Children today are more sensitive than ever and have an even greater need to express feelings. So many of the new problems we witness in children from hyperactivity and violence to low self-esteem and suicide will be solved as children get this support and learn to manage their emotions successfully.

WHY EXPRESSING EMOTION HELPS

The act of expressing negative emotions enables children to feel. Children become aware of their feelings by first expressing negative emotions. Feeling is the ability to know what is going on inside ourselves. Getting in touch with feelings makes us more aware of who we are, what we need, wish, and want. The ability to feel helps us to recognize and respect what others need, wish, and want as well. Listening to our children express negative emotions helps them to develop their ability to feel.

Creating safe opportunities for children to express and feel emotions of anger, sadness, and fear reconnects our children to their basic inner need for their parents’ love. Suddenly, getting their parents’ love becomes much more important than what they were upset about. When a child throws a huge tantrum because he or she can’t have a cookie, this child has just temporarily forgotten who is the boss and the importance of love over getting a cookie. Supporting children in expressing negative emotions will always bring them back to feeling their need for their parents’ love and a strong desire to cooperate and please their parents.

With an increased awareness of their need for love, suddenly the need for a cookie diminishes, the tantrum dissipates, and the child becomes more cooperative. In this way, children become once again grounded in their true self, which is happy, loving, confident, and peaceful. They are aware once again of their need for their parents’ love and their innate willingness to cooperate and please them. All this comes from creating a safe opportunity for children not to get their way, to throw a tantrum, and not to risk punishment or the loss of love in the process.

Listening with empathy and giving time outs are the most powerful ways a parent can give the message that it is okay to express negative feelings. Even when children resist going into a time out, it is okay. They may get angry and say mean things.

That is okay. A time out is an opportunity for children to resist with all their might and then finally surrender to the parents’ control. It is important for children to know that they are not bad for resisting a time out or for having to take one. It is seen simply a natural part of growing up.

You must make sure that you are not placating a child to avoid a tantrum, otherwise tantrums will happen when you don’t have an opportunity to give your child a time out to deal with his or her feelings. Children need to feel that they are in their parents’ control. When children stop feeling in their parents’ control or sense that their parents can’t control them, they seek control by becoming demanding or by throwing a tantrum.

THE POWER OF EMPATHY

To assist our children in expressing their negative emotions, parents must learn to develop empathy. It is not enough to love our children; we must also be able to communicate that love in meaningful ways. Although love is most important, how we demonstrate our love makes the difference. Communicating empathy is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give.

Empathy draws out children’s negative emotions and actually heals them. Empathy communicates the message that your feelings are valid. Parents are always in a hurry to reassure their children that things are all right. Before children can let that message in, they must first feel heard.

Children must experience just for a few brief seconds that you understand their perspective, and then they can absorb your reassuring perspective.

When a child is upset because he didn’t get what he wanted, many parents are too quick to make him feel better right away. This approach prevents the child from staying in touch with his feelings of loss. When a child feels his loss, he is most receptive to drawing in the empathy he needs.

Remember, it may only take a few seconds. After he receives the empathy, his emotions change. He either moves to a deeper level of negative emotions (from anger to sadness to fear), or he feels better. Not only does the child get what he needs to feel better, but he also experiences that he has the power to let go of negative emotions to feel better.

Giving empathy sometimes only requires a few extra seconds of silent caring and understanding.

When parents are always quick to give solutions so that a child feels better, the child misses the opportunity to learn how to let go of negative emotions and to find the positive feelings deep inside. When parents give solutions, children become dependent on solutions to feel better and don’t learn to accept life’s setbacks with a positive attitude. Our children become too dependent on getting what they want to be happy, rather than learning to be happy when there is love, no matter what the outer circumstances are.

When parents give empathy rather than solutions, children develop the ability to adjust to any negative circumstance or disappointment without having to fix things. By giving children empathy before helping them solve their problem, children develop the ability to let go of negative emotions and to feel better and then to move on to solving the problem. Most adults today still have not developed this ability, because as children they did not get the empathy they needed. When children only get solutions to their problems, they stop going to their parents for help.

THE FIVE-SECOND PAUSE

Sometimes all it takes is just to slow down and not try to solve your children’s problems. When they are angry, sad, disappointed, or worried, instead of telling them how to feel better about the situation, the positive-parenting approach is to do nothing but simply feel for five seconds what they are probably feeling. When the child feels disappointed, instead of trying to cheer her up it is better to just let her feel disappointed and feel what she is feeling. Pause for five seconds and simply feel what you think, feel, or sense she is feeling.

Instead of giving a solution, just feel her disappointment along with her and then after five seconds say something simple like, “I know, it is really disappointing.” This gives the child a clear message that disappointment is a part of life.

Nothing dramatically wrong has happened. Very quickly a child’s mood will begin to change. More than anything, children need a clear message that for life to be okay, they don’t need positive things to happen all the time.

When you have a quick solution, it not only minimizes their feelings, but also reinforces a sense of incompetence. If it is so easy for you to solve what is wrong with them, either they feel wrong for being upset, or they feel inadequate for not dealing with the situation the way you suggested in your quick fix. Certainly, a solution is given with love, but, if administered right away, it can have the opposite effect you are intending. Solutions are fine once the child has started to feel better or begins to ask for another way of dealing with the situation.

Sometimes even when a child is asking for a solution, he is still not ready to receive one. Although he is asking for a solution, he really needs more empathy. The child might say in an upset tone, “I don’t know what to do.” At this point, most fathers will jump in and offer a solution. Then, quite often, a father will get into a power struggle or argument.

His child will inevitably respond to the “solution” with the resistance of “but.” The “but” meaning, “But that doesn’t apply,” or “But that doesn’t work because . . . ,” or “But you just don’t understand.”

When a child says, “You don’t understand,” this will generally put most fathers on the defensive and, instead of being there for the child, the child will eventually have to be there for the father. The father begins to demand that the child understand why he is right. This is not the right arrangement. The parent is responsible for the child and not the other way around.

When a child says, “You don’t understand,” stop immediately. Bite the bullet. Agree with the child. He is right. At that moment, you are not understanding or feeling what he is feeling. Instead of retracing your steps and explaining that you do understand what he has said or his situation, just stop and agree. Say something like this, “You’re right, I don’t understand. Tell me again.” This time, back off from giving solutions and focus on giving empathy.

These are a few examples of the common solutions mom or dad might give and alternative statements to communicate empathy.

Giving a Solution: Don’t cry.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds then say: I know . . . it’s disappointing.

Giving a Solution: Don’t worry.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds, then say: It is difficult. I know you are worried.

Giving a Solution: It will be okay tomorrow.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds, then say: It is hard. I know you’re disappointed.

Giving a Solution: It’s not such a big deal.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds, then say: I know you feel hurt. Let me give you a hug.

Giving a Solution: Hey, you can’t win them all.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds, then say: I know you’re sad. I would be sad, too.

Giving a Solution: Hey, come on . . . that’s life.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds, then say: You have a right to be angry. I would be angry, too.

Giving a Solution: It could be a lot worse.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds, then say: I can see you’re afraid. I would be afraid, too.

Giving a Solution: You’ll do fine . . . everything will be all right.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds, then say: I know you are scared. It’s scary.

Giving a Solution: It’s not that important anyway.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds, then say: It’s okay to be jealous. I would feel jealous, too.

Giving a Solution: You’ll get another chance.

Empathizing: Pause five seconds, then say: If that happened to me, I would be disappointed, too.

WHEN CHILDREN RESIST EMPATHY

When giving empathy messages, a child may resist and correct the parent by saying, “That is not what I am feeling” and then proceed to talk about how she is feeling. Even if you believe you were right, it is important not to interrupt her flow to defend your observation. The point is not to be right, but to help your child express her feelings.

When a child is upset, there are always a variety of feelings inside. By pointing out one feeling a child may be having, he will quickly move on to another by saying, “No I’m not angry; I am sad.” Although it may feel as if he is not listening to you, try to remember that this is the time when he needs you to listen to him. When a child’s feelings shift and move on, it is a good thing.

With a greater awareness of their different feelings, children can more quickly let go of them. If a child rejects your empathy or corrects your statement with a comment like, “That’s not how I feel . . . ,” make sure you don’t get into an argument. Just accept the resistance and keep listening. As the child continues to talk about his or her feelings, you have succeeded in helping.

If a child has not had ample opportunities to express feelings in the recent past, then empathizing with current feelings may open up a whole box of feelings. All the things that have bothered the child over the last several months or even years may begin to come up. This is good. Let it happen.

Just listen. Once it is out, the child will soon feel better.

Parents often make the mistake of trying to cut children off by pointing out that they are not correct or they are getting off the subject. That does not need to be said. Instead, just let them talk, and eventually they will be able to forget the past and appreciate you for listening.

WHEN PARENTS EXPRESS NEGATIVE EMOTIONS

Negative emotions tend to stimulate emotional reactions in others. When someone is sad, we feel sad. When someone is angry with us, we often feel anger in return. If someone is really scared, we may suddenly become unsettled or worried. If we are already upset, then another person’s emotions will stimulate our own feelings.

This helps explain why it can be so difficult to listen to a child cry or why being empathetic is easy sometimes but difficult at other times. If you have had a bad day and feel unsettled emotionally, listening to your children may become more difficult. All it takes is for your child to get upset, and suddenly your unresolved feelings come up in reaction to your child.

For example, if you are already frustrated because there seems to be too much to do and not enough time, you will have a greater tendency to overreact to your children. If your child is upset and frustrated with her homework and you are trying to help her, it will trigger your own frustrated feelings. Suddenly you’ll find yourself lashing out in a frustrated manner with your child. What started out as a loving gesture of help turns into a painful argument.

When parents react to their children’s negative emotions with more negative emotion, it doesn’t make children feel safe to express negative emotion. When parents express negative emotion, they are bigger, louder, and more powerful.

Strong adult emotions intimidate children into not expressing negative emotions. Eventually, children become numb to their feelings when it is not safe to express them.

Some mothers regain control of their children by letting out a loud, high-pitched, emotionally charged scream. Suddenly, their children behave. They suddenly behave because it is suddenly not safe to feel negative emotions, and, the child becomes obedient out of fear. While this method works in the short run, it numbs children to their inner feelings and suppresses their inner willpower.

Fathers establish control and dominance by yelling in a mean, angry tone. Suddenly their children behave immediately. Again, the children behave because it is not safe to express negative emotions. They become temporarily obedient out of fear. Children often suppress anger, because their parents get angry in return. While this kind of intimidating control used to work, it doesn’t work today. Children raised with this kind of intimidation either become rebellious later and resist cooperation or they become submissive and lack direction.

If we are to help our children manage their feelings, we must also manage our own feelings. To overcome our tendency as parents to expel our unresolved feelings on our children, we need to take time for ourselves to cope with stress and process unresolved emotional issues. Unless we take time for ourselves to cope with stress, we block our children from learning to manage their feelings.

Parents cannot patiently listen to children express resistant feelings of anger, sadness, and fear if they are holding in unresolved feelings of anger, disappointment, frustration, worry, or fear. If parents are resisting dealing with feelings within themselves, then they will automatically resist dealing with their children’s negative feelings.

Children cannot get the empathy they need when a parent is resisting what he or she hears. When children get the message that their emotions and needs for understanding and affection are an inconvenience, they will begin to suppress their feelings and disconnect from their true self and all the gifts that come from being authentic.

Until the parents deal with their own feelings, they are less effective in helping their children to manage feelings.

Yet, if they do take time to cope with stress and nurture their own adult needs for conversation, romance, and independence, they are able to come back and give so much more to their children. When parents take care of their own needs first, then they are most capable of putting into use the five skills of positive parenting.

THE MISTAKE OF SHARING FEELINGS

In the 1970s, adults started becoming aware of the importance of getting in touch with feelings. Just as adults needed to be in touch, we recognized that our children needed to learn about feelings as well. In an attempt to teach children how to get in touch with feelings, “enlightened” parents started sharing feelings with their children. Though the goal was correct, the process was not so effective.

Feelings need to be shared with peers, and children are not their parents’ peers. When one shares a negative emotion, there is an underlying need to be heard. The listener then responds with empathy, compassion, and assistance.

The problem with sharing negative emotions with children is that they cannot respond without feeling overly responsible for the parent. It is fine for children to share feelings with each other or with their parents, but it is not okay for parents to share negative emotions with kids.

Children are hardwired to please their parents. If parents share negative emotions, then their child will feel responsible for comforting the parent. In a very real sense, the child begins to feel responsible to care for the parent. The child, who is the one who needs to be cared for, takes the responsibility to care for the parent. This reversal of roles is very unhealthy for the child. Girls will tend to lose touch with their own feelings and needs and care more for the parent.

Boys will tend to reject this responsibility and stop listening or caring.

When a parent is upset after a fight and then gets upset with their children, there is no way the children can understand they are not responsible for the parents’ feelings. If the mother goes on to share her problems with her spouse, the children will feel even more responsible to solve the problem. It is hard enough for married adults to hear each other without feeling blamed or responsible. There is no way children can hear parents’ negative emotions without taking on too much responsibility. Ultimately, this increased awareness of their parents’ feelings will numb them to their own. As teenagers, they will eventually pull away and stop talking to their parents.

For example, telling a child, “I am worried that you will get hurt” or “I am sad that you didn’t call” has the gradual effect of making a child feel manipulated and controlled by negative feelings. Instead, an adult should say, “I want you to be more careful” or “I want you to call me next time.”

This is not only more effective, but it also teaches children not to make decisions based on negative emotions. The child cooperates not to protect the parent from the discomfort of feeling afraid, but because the parent has asked him to do something.

Parents can best help their children develop an increased awareness of feelings not by sharing their own feelings, but by empathizing, acknowledging, and listening. Using the five skills of positive parenting will automatically draw out your children’s feelings.

ASKING CHILDREN HOW THEY FEEL

Just as a child should not feel responsible for a parent’s feelings, children should not think that their emotions and wants put them in control. It is not wrong to ask a child how she feels or what she wants, but it should be done sparingly. If you are thinking about doing something and you ask your child how she feels about that, she may get the message that her feelings determine what you will decide.

This gives too much attention to her feelings and wants and gives the wrong message that she is in control.

Directly asking children how they feel or what they want gives them too much power. Children need their parents to be in control, but also need to feel that their expressed resistance, feelings, wishes, and wants will be heard and considered.

Better than, “How do you feel about going to visit Uncle Robert?” say, “Let’s get ready to visit Uncle Robert.”

If they would rather go swimming, they will let you know how they feel.

Directly asking your children how they feel can sometimes have the opposite effect of what you want. A direction question puts too much pressure on children to know how they feel when they haven’t yet developed self-awareness.

Too many questions can awaken self-awareness too soon.

It is generally around the age of nine that children begin feeling embarrassed by things and experience greater modesty about their bodies. With this increased self-awareness, they are ready for more direct questions about feelings.

Instead of asking a child how he feels, a parent can simply make an empathetic statement like, “I can see you are frustrated.” At this point, the child’s feelings and willingness to talk about feelings are stimulated.

The best way to teach awareness of feelings is to listen and to help identify feelings through empathy. Another way parents can create an understanding environment for feelings is by telling stories. Parents can successfully communicate that they too have feelings by telling stories of how they felt in reaction to some challenges in life growing up. This way, the child doesn’t feel in any way responsible to help the parent or make things better.

After a child talks about how afraid she is of taking a test, the parent might then disclose a sweet story from his childhood when he had to take a test and was afraid as well.

Telling these stories should not only validate the child’s feelings, but also give a reassuring message at the end.

WHAT YOU SUPPRESS, YOUR CHILDREN WILL EXPRESS

Even when a parent doesn’t share feelings, children may still be affected by them. Some parents realize that it is inappropriate to share their feelings with their children, but they don’t have effective ways of releasing them. As a result, particularly at stressful times, their unresolved emotions build up inside. Although they are holding them back, they can still affect their children.

When parents bottle up their own negative feelings, it will tend to intensify children’s feelings. What parents suppress, their children will tend to express. It is often the most sensitive child in the family who takes on the unresolved emotional issues of the family. Therapists now commonly recognize that when a child has a problem, it is often linked to problems the parents are having.

If you are feeling anxious about deadlines, you may find that your children are always complaining about too much to do and not enough time. If you are feeling emotionally neglected or unsupported, one of your children is always complaining that he feels neglected. In these examples, what you are suppressing is being felt and taken in by one of your children.

It is as if they are sponges. If you are filled with love and empathy, they soak up your love to heal their own wounds and upsets. If you are filled with anxiety, depression, anger, sadness, fear, turmoil, resentment, or frustration, that is what they absorb. They literally take on your negative feelings and then act them out.

This explains why, on those days when you are extremely frustrated or overwhelmed, your children erupt with emotional turmoil or become extremely needy or demanding.

When parents are not taking care of their own needs, the children will absorb that neediness and express it. Children act out at the most inconvenient times, because it is at those times that you are not giving yourself enough time as well.

Certainly, children have their own issues and emotions, but when they have to take on their parents’ emotions as well they become overwhelmed and they explode in tantrums.

Keep in mind that children will throw tantrums even if their parents are successfully dealing with their own emotions.

One way to determine that your child is acting out your feelings or their feelings is the resistance test. If you resist their feelings, then clearly they are expressing some of what you are resisting in yourself. If you are able to listen patiently with empathy, then clearly they are not acting out your unresolved feelings.

If you do feel resistance to their feelings it doesn’t mean you are a bad parent. It is a clear sign that you need to take some time for yourself to nurture your own needs. It is fortunate that at those times when you can’t be there for your children you can fall back on giving a time out. Regardless of what you are suppressing and the child is expressing, a time out will work to assist your child in dealing with what needs to be expressed.

Quite often, after giving a time out, parents feel better, too, because their child has expressed all their negative emotions. This is often why spanking and whipping children used to work so well to create temporary peace in the family.

Not only did the child feel and express their pain, but the parents’ suppressed feelings and pain was expressed as well.

In this way everyone felt temporary relief.

THE BLACK SHEEP OF THE FAMILY

When parents have not learned to release negative emotions and instead suppress their inner feelings, at least one of their children will tend to take those feelings on, generally the most sensitive of the children. This child is often considered the black sheep of the family. Without an environment that accepts and nurtures negative emotions, these children either act out these feelings and become disruptive, or they turn the feelings inward and suffer low self-esteem. Quite often, both reactions occur.

These “black sheep” children are unable to get the nurturing and empathy they need, and the problems become worse.

They will express the very feelings their parents are resisting and rejecting within themselves. Instead of feeling loved, understood, and embraced, they are resisted, resented, and rejected. They cannot get the love and support they need in order to process the strong emotions that they feel.

Often they don’t know why they feel so upset and eventually conclude that something is wrong with them. The reality is that nothing is innately wrong with them. They behave inappropriately and get stuck in negative attitudes and feelings, because they are not getting the nurturing they need. These children can often get the support they need outside the family with others who are more understanding.

If one of your children tends to be the black sheep of the family, take extra time to listen to that child’s feelings.

Remember that every child is different and make sure that you don’t ever compare children. This child needs lots of support from activities outside the family where he or she will not feel the pressure to take on and act out the unresolved problems and feelings of others.

MAKING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS OKAY

Making negative emotions okay is a completely different way of parenting. Never have adults and children had so many feelings. Never have we been so sensitive. The challenge of making feelings okay is great. It is not as if we have been raised by parents who knew how to handle and nurture the free expression of emotions. Yet with these new insights and skills of positive parenting, you will succeed.

As a result, your children will not be limited by life, but instead will be creative and capable of creating the life they want to lead. With a greater awareness of feelings, they will eventually know the truth of who they are and what they are here for in this world. They will still face challenges, sometimes even greater ones than their parents have, but they will have new and powerful resources for achieving their goals and making their dreams come true.