The Conscious Parent

prepare to be disappointed in the long run. There are no tidy answers in
parenting. So-called “tough love” ultimately breeds resentment. Your
task is to curb your heavy-handedness so that your children learn to
depend on their internal resources to figure out the right or wrong
behavior in any given situation. Though once in a while a harried parent
might inadvertently scold a child, and even raise their voice—as I related
happened to me on the day at the beach when my daughter was three
years old—this can’t be a regular pattern if we are to raise children
consciously.
When you engage in heavy-handed tactics, your reprimands trigger
guilt and anxiety in your children. In such a situation, they don’t respect
either you or themselves. When your children don’t feel respect, they
instead feel guilt, which in turn results in either a sense of emptiness or a
lack of empathy toward others. The guilt stems from the fact that no
child on Earth wants to feel uncontained and disrespectful.
Conscious behavior shaping requires a shift from a dynamic in which a
child feels threatened, maligned, or lesser-than. It seeks to bring order in
a manner that takes the needs of both parties into account. For this
reason, the dialogue can’t be one-sided. We must always ask ourselves
whether we are responding to our children’s behavior out of a need of
our own or out of service to our children, and we must be open to their
input. Discipline can’t be, “I said so, and that’s the way it is.” It must
include, “These are the rules, but you are free to have your experience of
them, and I am available to hear your feelings about them.” Conscious
discipline asks that children follow our instructions, but also allows them
the freedom to express their sentiments.