The Conscious Parent

her when they departed, ruining her son’s revelry and shaming him in
front of his buddies, who were spending the night at the house. On the
heels of her explosion, she got into a fight with her husband, then created
a scene with the DJ. Because the occasion hadn’t lived up to her
expectations, she made everyone miserable.
When our life doesn’t go according to plan and we respond with
resistance and emotional velocity, it’s because we feel threatened. As our
fantasy of how life “should” be falls apart, our egoic need to control
things shows itself. Unable to accept that our loved ones and life itself
aren’t our automatons, here to bend to our will, we impose our manic
desire to “look” a certain way on everyone and everything. What we
can’t see is that holding onto the fantasy that life is supposed to have a
fairy-tale ending often comes at the price of our loved ones’ well-being.
When we parent from the traditional approach, we encourage our
children to look up to us because this is how we were raised. To be good
parents, we feel we need to be all-knowing and all-powerful. Little do we
realize that when we portray ourselves as so competent, we foster
inhibition and fear in our children. They look at us and see an image so
out of reach that it causes them to feel inordinately small. In this way,
we imprint in them the idea that they are “less than” us, which
discourages them from getting in touch with their own competence.
When our children experience us as always “in the know,” always
there with a perfect solution or a correct opinion, they grow up believing
they need to be the same way. Uncomfortable with our imperfections and
resistant to exposing our flaws, we teach them to disguise their
imperfections and overcompensate for their weaknesses. What they