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Parents should instill courage
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Published: March 19, 2009
On my back porch deck is a beautiful flowering plant that has at least one hundred blossoms on it. I'm not an experienced grower. I don't even know the name of the plant. It has runners that grew up the post and keeps expanding. I did discover it needed to be constantly watered. When I missed a few days, it began to droop.
Now, why am I writing about flowers when I am supposed to be addressing parenting issues? Actually, I do want to use this flower to illustrate one of the main tasks of a good parent. Dr. Rudoff Dreikurs, a leading psychiatrist who has written extensively on parenting, once said, "A child needs encouragement like a flower needs water." What Dreikurs is highlighting with this statement is the primary task of a parent: To instill courage in children.
Courage is the heart of any successful person. Courage is having the confidence to keep trying when all the odds seem to be against you. Courage allows you to see beyond a failure, the strength to learn from your failures and try again. Courage is born in children when parents (and grandparents) "water" them with encouragement from the time they come home from the birthing room until they go off to college. Wise parents look for ways to encourage children through all the developmental stages.
Dr. Michael Popkin, author of Active Parenting, has identified four parenting behaviors that discourage children, rather than fostering courage. Perfectionism is the first courage buster. Parents who expect perfection from a child will radically damage a child. Children have a lot to learn to become responsible adults and they are going to make many mistakes along the way to maturity.
Focusing on mistakes is the second courage buster. Constantly criticizing a child for her/his shortcomings does not build courage. "How can I help?" will get a lot more mileage than "Can't you do anything right?"
A third discouraging parental behavior is overprotection. Parents who continually hover over a child and do things for a child that the child should be doing, raise children with very little self-confidence and very little belief in herself/himself. Children have to build their own "courage muscles." If you go to the gym with your 13-year-old son and he is there to build up his muscles and you lift the weights while he watches, whose muscles will grow? It is the same principle with building courage in children.
The last courage buster in children is negative expectations. Parents who have a negative attitude toward their children can set them up for sure failure. If a parent has no confidence in a child's potential and abilities, the child will pick up on the parents' negative expectations, and live down to those expectations. Believing in your child helps the child belief in herself/himself.
Your child was created in the image of God, endowed with unlimited potentialities and multiple internal gifts that need to blossom and grow. Parenting is watering these potentialities and gifts with encouragement, love, discipline and affirmation.
Dr. Bill Mitcham is the Director/Therapist at The Marriage Maintenance Center at 442 South Main, Suite 20, Davidson, NC, 28036. He is a State Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and can be reached at 704-408-4187or email at bmitcham@bellsouth.net.
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