One young mother I know went into the hospital for back pains and came out with a baby.  Many fathers don’t know they even had child until significantly after their child’s’ birth. Being a parent obviously doesn’t even require forethought (though of course, not being a parent does) let alone education.

I have often heard it lamented that while you have to take classes, even get advanced college degrees to be qualified for and employable in most of the important types of employment, the most important job most of us will ever have requires not even a single class.   Parenting requires no education.  Yet it is unquestionably the most difficult and important job.  Birthing children is a biological process that doesn’t require education or even planning.

Commonly parents have the false belief that since they had parents they know how to parent (or in many cases how not to parent).  How many times have you heard someone say, “I’m going to do it differently with my kids”?  Yet eventually, they lament that they have found themselves saying the same things to their kids that their parents said to them, or doing the same things with their kids that their parents did.  Unconsciously, without parent education, we do what we saw done. It’s the only model we have, so we follow it, whether we think it’s a good one or not.

In most cultures, children are raised in some variation of an authoritarian model.  We expect our children to behave and to do it immediately without question. We often expect them to do this even before they have been educated as to what to do or how to do it.  That’s because we have this system in our heads that unconsciously tells us “children are to be seen and not heard” or some version of the same idea. We also think of children as extensions of ourselves and we don’t want them to behave in ways that we would not, and are generally very upset if they behave in ways that we would not.  We send them overt and covert messages that they are to do as we say.  Of course, those or us raised in the Dr. Spock era (no, not the Vulcan) may have gotten more permissive parents, but just relaxing the rules wasn’t really an answer either (recall the hippy drug user years). My own parents tended toward flipping between the permissive and authoritarian models.  They were generally permissive, but when things got out of hand would flip into overt attempts and authoritarian control.

Now, obviously our models for parenting have not been a total failure, our world has produced a significant number of creative genius’s and great leaders. And today, many parents struggle with not wanting to be like their authoritarian parents but end up creating selfish spoiled brats who don’t know how to respect anyone or anything.  So what’s a “good enough” parent supposed to do anyway?

We have to learn how to respect our children, to help them become stewards of their own lives by learning to take ownership of their things and their behaviors, and to have empathy for others.  We do not do this by always giving them what they want. We do not do this by making sure they always do what we say. We do not do this by ignoring how they feel. We have to come from an entirely new paradigm.

Over the pat ten years I have developed a model for understanding how we humans relate to each other and to ourselves that can transform our old paradigm of parenting into one that allows for respect, ownership and empathy.  When we understand how even our parenting is driven by our survival mechanisms, and how these mechanisms dictate our behaviors as parents we can transform how we relate to our children.

The cycles that we get caught in as parents are dictated by these survival mechanisms and do not allow for us to truly respect our children.  We get thrown into feeling that we must rescue them from their pain, (so we buy them whatever they want as the “Rescuer”). Or we get to feeling that we absolutely must get control of them (our survival or at least our well being is threatened as the “Self-Protector”). We might even get to the place of feeling that they have all the power and we are powerless to impact their behavior (then they have no respect for us as the “Victim”).  When we get thrown into these roles we are caught in a cycle that has no joy and continually stirs up drama and misery.

Fortunately there is an alternative.  We can learn to develop the ability to give our children the respect they need (and get it back from them).  We can teach them to take ownership of their lives. They can lean how to give empathy to others and live compassionately with themselves and others.

The key to compassionate parenting is to understand how to respect our children as human beings.  They are not mindless, thoughtless creatures that we have to mold into what we want.  They are all born with their own mind and their ways of doing things and seeing the world.  It is my belief that they come pre-programmed with an internal wisdom telling them when something is right for them and when it is not.  Of course this doesn’t mean they have the worldly knowledge to know that (for instance) a car can run right over their little bodies.  But they do have, as I believe we all do, an inner sense of rightness and wrongness that can guide them, with our help.

By allowing ourselves to respect their internal wisdom and by treating them as little human beings capable of way more than is obvious we begin to transform how we parent. Instead of insisting they do everything the way we feel is right, we give them the freedom (with our supervision) to learn what they can of the world for themselves without our interference unless their safety is at risk.

Children blossom in a respectful environment and become more capable, more tenacious, more creative when respected in this way. They then develop a sense of themselves that cannot be swayed by what others want of them or pressured into doing things that go against their internal sense of themselves.  It inoculates them against peer pressure and develops an unshakable sense of self.

Melody Brooke is a Professional Counselor and Marriage and Family Therapist, graduating Texas Woman’s University in 1989. She is published in Radix Journal, Dallas Recovery Magazine, The Southwest Morticians Journal, Plano Child Magazine, on the Dan and Jennifer Relationship website, and is the author of Cycles of the Heart; A way out of the egocentrism of everyday life. Contact Melody at www.awakenedheartproductions.com