Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

Introduction
     
    Consider the toddler. Having made it through the year of infancy, a year of almost complete helplessness, toddlers are entering a radical new phase of life. They are learning to stand on their own (a nice metaphor, don’t you think?) and are on their way to taking their first steps. Soon they will be feeding themselves. Toddlers will be exploring speech and making themselves understood. Two years from now, when this period of learning is complete, children will understand that they are separate beings from their parents. They will be able to say, “Yes!” “No!” “Thank you,” and even “I love you,” and know what they mean. Toddler-hood is that magical time when children learn the beginnings of personhood.
    Now consider the preschooler. In many ways, preschoolers appear to be little adults, having mastered many of the basics of personhood. They can talk (and be mostly understood) in an evergrowing vocabulary, dress and feed themselves, walk, run, climb, and jump. Yet, preschoolers are still just starting on their journey toward personhood, along which their personalities will become more defined and their values, attitudes, and beliefs about themselves and the world will form and become ingrained in their minds.
    Finally, consider the elementary schooler entering that big and exciting world beyond their home. It’s a world they are not fully prepared to navigate. Nonetheless, they are thrust out the front door into an intense maelstrom of messages, both positive and negative, which they are still largely ill prepared to assimilate in any kind of reasoned fashion. Over the next few years, their personalities and their self-perceptions and views of the world will become more established and will guide the direction that their lives will take.
    Toddlerhood, preschool, and the early elementary school years are also the time when you have your best possible chance to have your say about what kind of person you would like your child to become. Perhaps eight years max. After that, your influence slowly but inexorably diminishes.
I’M A “PARENTING EXPERT”
     
    I have a PhD in psychology and am the author of two previous parenting books, I have a consulting practice that involves working with young people and their parents, and I regularly speak to gatherings of parents, educators, and students around the world. For many years I’ve been a “parenting expert.” But here’s the hitch: I wrote those parenting books and became a so-called parenting expert before I had children.
    The instant my first daughter, Catie, was born, I went from being an authority on parenting to just another baffled parent trying to muddle through raising my children. In fifteen years I may write another parenting book titled
I’m Sorry, They Seemed Like Good Ideas at the Time.
    That said, my professional experience has demonstrated that my ideas about raising children do stand up to the test of real-life parenting. Now that I am the father of two young girls, five-year-old Catie and three-year-old Gracie, I have firsthand experience tosupport the value of my approach to raising children. Plus, being a parent has helped me to better understand what actually works and what doesn’t in the real world of raising children.
HOW DO CHILDREN BECOME WHO THEY BECOME?
     
    The key question that intrigues me as both a parent and a so-called parenting expert is: How do children become who they become? Certainly, genetics plays a formative role; intelligence, physical attributes, and temperament all have been found to have a strong hereditary component. Evidence is equally strong that the environment also contributes significantly. It is no longer a dispute between nature
versus
nurture, but rather a collaboration of sorts involving nature
via
nurture: How children are raised and the environment in which they live influence which genetic predispositions emerge as they develop.
    So what aspects of the environment affect children’s development? Some have argued that parents have much less influence than they like to think and that peers and popular culture affect children more. However, I believe that during these early years, you have a window of opportunity before your children become integrated into the larger social world—and that, during this period, your impact on your children is greater than that of outside forces.
    Consider this: During this period your children are absolutely ravenous for every morsel of