The Conscious Parent

Many parents get into daily battles with their children over food, which
clothes to wear, or how homework should be done. Most of these battles
are related to our ego and its need for control. If we regularly find
ourselves embroiled in frequent conflict with our children over petty
issues, this could be a sign we are too invested in our children’s lives.
When an issue isn’t a matter of life or death and yet we insist on our
way of doing things, we may imagine we are teaching our children
respect for rules, whereas in reality we are teaching them to be like us—
rigid and unyielding. This is why conflict continues relentlessly. Our
children soon turn a deaf ear because they know we want things done our
way regardless of their wishes. This is how stealing, sneaking, and lying
begin.
In our anxiety, we sometimes become ultra strict without meaning to.
Driven by fear we will lose control and be overpowered by our children,
we become extremely stern. We then treat even healthy defiance as a
sign of disobedience, a breach of our authority.
Everything can’t be a rule. A house with too many rules will simply
fall apart one day. Children who are brought up with an undue amount of
rules, with insufficient free space to explore and experiment, are likely
to swing to the wild side, unable to metabolize their parents’ rigidity any
longer.
When everything is treated as a rule, our children feel stifled. The
worst thing we can do to their spirit is create an atmosphere in which
their every expression of themselves is scrutinized for potential rule
violation. If rules are to garner our children’s attention, they need to be
simple and few, so that our children grow up in a household in which