Excellent Parents Live in the Present

The first golden rule for excellent parenting was to pay attention. Which naturally brings us to being present; the second golden rule.

The present moment is all that you really have, in reality. The past is memory and the future is a probability. Many of us are challenged by the memories of our past and the fears of our future from being in the present moment. And for a kid with a parent removed from ‘present’ can mean multiple implications:

Children cannot be paid attention to appropriately until you are not fully present in the moment to give attention to your kid’s need. We tell participants in our workshops that it’s a  sign that you are removed from your present moment if you hit a glass door while trying to walk through it; failing to realise that there is a door in front of you. You completely miss out on it because you were busy in your thoughts.

If you are agonizing over how your spouse criticized your weight gain in front of others last night or worried about getting late to work, there are high chances that you will ascribe your child’s demand to reasons completely off track. So let’s say, you might shove a bottle of milk up your baby’s mouth when all that needed to be done was a gentle rocking to make it sleep. But you were too consumed by what happened last night and or what is looming out large for you.

The more removed a parent is from the present situation, graver are the implications on a child’s upbringing.

Dwelling in the Past

Dwelling in the past brings one guilt, resentment and bitterness.

A lot of us have a tendency to hang onto our past. We dwell on what someone did to us 20 years ago, or how we could have chosen a better career, married a better person etc. This is an ungrateful view of the past. This view chooses to look at the real or perceived dreadfulness of the past and lets go of the countless blessings that came along the way.

Such a worldview makes a person a victim. Victims feel like they have been wronged and that they have no control over how life has treated them. Whether what they feel is legitimate or not, these people tend to carry immense emotional baggage. And this baggage transfers onto their children in the shape of guilt, resentment and bitterness.

An example of resentment passing onto children is how they feel towards relatives that the parents feel bitter towards. The children may have never seen the ‘wretched’ relatives but they feel angry at them because they have inherited the anger. We fail to realise at times that we are inculcating a sense of bitterness in children towards relatives that they did not choose to have. When we feel bitter towards that which has come to us by destiny, we are reducing our locus of joyfulness. We are choosing displeasure over delight. We are replacing the child’s natural sense of affinity with a rancid sense of judgment. No wonder in the Eastern cultures, women carry so much hatred towards the in laws (from living together with them) that the children end up growing with a biased attitude towards one branch of the family.

How we deal with difficult people should really be our choice and not part of a gene pool that gets carried over several generations. I know courageous people who have walked out of their marriages and not transferred their emotional hurt and bitterness towards the spouse into their children. The children in turn have grown up to be emotionally healthy in spite of loss.

By transferring our own judgment of certain people into our children, we incapacitate them when they have to deal with diverse people on their own. They might use our standard of judging someone in a completely different situation which could fail terribly.

An example of guilt going into children, is how parents sometimes like to tell their children how they struggled and slaved for them for little in return. “I spent my youth toiling for you”. Such children grow up with a sense of guilt. They try to over achieve in order to satisfy their parents or themselves and in turn burn themselves out. Sometimes these children grow up to be confused individuals with a complete lack of focus on what fulfills them.

Dwelling in the Future

Our fears of the future on one hand prevent us from enjoying the beauty of Now with our loved ones. Imagine how much your children miss out on your love, presence and attention because you are too busy battling with the future. On the other hand, our fear of the future disables our capacity to deal with the present effectively. Fear makes a child grow up into an unconfident,  cowardly and mistrusting adult.

In one of our programs on Excellence for Mothers, some participants spoke of their fear of sending their child alone with the driver given the increasing crime rate. We discussed in the workshop that there’s a healthy way to manage this fear. You could check your driver’s record from the local police station, you could discuss with your child your concerns in a healthy way and if the child is too young, you could send a caretaker along. Beyond doing all that you can do to secure the child’s safety, there’s nothing much that can be done. Do not let fear of the future disable your capability of managing your present.

We carry a lot of fear of the future that becomes a part of our child’s worldview. We worry for their grades; making them the proverbial rat-in-a-race devoid of any love for learning, we worry for their career, “No job spurt for the next two decades, what will my kids do?”; hence bringing their attention to scarcity rather than abundance. This attention to scarcity stops the child from using his creativity to work out his way through life successfully.

Finally, the fear is as debilitating for a child as is guilt and resentment. As parents it is highly important for us to gauge if we tend to focus on our past and future more than the present and rectify the time gap vehemently.

photo credit: Ed Yourdon, B Rosen and miguelavg