Parents, Take Charge with Love

I believe that love is already in charge of your child. Love rules the universe. Everything that happens, happens FOR us, provides us with the support and opportunity we need to live more with love.

To be in charge of your child, be in love with your child. Parent in a loving mode. When love is what you express from your heart, through your thoughts, speech, and actions, you align with the greater power of love, and that makes you in charge.

Truly taking charge in your relationship with your child begins with taking charge of yourself first. When your child can make you react with anger and stress, your child is in charge, and not in a good way.

Being in charge of yourself means that you can choose your responses strategically instead of having to react habitually, emotionally, blindly when you don't get your way.

Taking charge of yourself begins with taking total responsibility for your reactions to your child's actions. If you blame your child for how you react, you make your child responsible for your behavior, which provides your child with no real leadership. Additionally, when your reaction causes you to feel angry, frustrated, unhappy, or powerless, you then feel and act like a victim of your child's behavior. Your child picks up on this and treats you with less respect.

Let me suggest a subtle shift in your thinking that creates a major change. Rather than thinking of your reaction to your child's actions as a result of your child's behavior, think of your reactions as a cause of your child's behavior. Because how you react to your child influences how your child thinks, feels, and acts. This slight shift in perspective empowers you to choose loving responses in line with what you really want to accomplish with your child. It places you in charge in with love.

Taking charge of yourself first makes nature your parenting ally. Because nature programs children to do as you do and to say as you say, your child automatically improves his or her level of self-control and self-direction as you improve yours. So, never discipline a child using a behavior you don't want the child to repeat, because nature has programmed your child to repeat it.

You don't have to parent with anger and stress, impatience and frustration, disapproval and disappointment. You don't have to raise your voice, argue, endlessly repeat yourself, harshly criticize and complain. You don't have to hit, lose your temper, or just give up in disgust. Those painful modes of parenting represent choices that you make, choices that make you and your child miserable.

You can parent most effectively in a mode of loving peace and poise, which is the mode you really want to parent in anyway. In loving peace and poise you parent in your most resourceful state. You can think more clearly, exercise better judgment, come up with creative solutions, relate with more understanding, respond more constructively. When you lose your center of loving peace and poise, you lose your power to parent effectively. You continue repeating the same old painful, disturbing reactions, while hopelessly hoping for a better result.

Parenting with more loving peace and poise takes exercise. As you practice it in the face of every parenting challenge, your "muscle" of self-control gradually strengthens. In time, it will grow stronger than your child's power to disturb you. That makes you in charge.

Bear in mind that no approach to sane parenting gives you absolute power over your child's behavior. Sometimes the best you can do is to exercise your self-control while your child appears beyond your control. But if you persist in your commitment to being in charge with love, and without anger or stress, you will gradually find your ability to lead your child improving as your child demonstrates better leadership of himself and herself.

It might help you to think about it this way: When you lose your loving peace and poise, you lose your power to produce the positive results you really want with your children. The more you practice parenting in a mode of loving peace and poise, the more that you find that it really works.