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

predisposed to communicate to your children. Perhaps it’s looking back on your childhood and recalling how bad it felt when your parents sent you certain messages—for example, messages of needing to be perfect to earn their love. Or seeing another parent send the same unhealthy message that you have been conveying to your children and being appalled by the message and saddened by their children’s reaction, for instance, seeing another parent get angry at their child when he makes a mess. Or putting yourself in your children’s shoes and seeing their reaction to your message, for example, imagining how they feel when you constantly correct their language mistakes. In all these cases, insight is likely to hit you like a ton of bricks and motivate you to change your messages for the sake of your children.
    Another thing you’ll realize as you become more conscious of your messages is that you won’t be able to recognize and preempt all of the bad messages you may be communicating to your children. I can assure you that both Sarah and I were shocked with some frequency by the messages that we would send to Catie and Gracie that we either hadn’t predicted in our many earlier discussions or that we didn’t think we were capable of conveying. Parents can even say what would seem to us to be fairly innocuousthings and still send a powerful message to their children that they won’t forget. For example, on several occasions while shopping in the downtown district of a nearby town, Sarah has expressed concern about getting a parking ticket. Now, Catie, at five years old, worries about getting a parking ticket whenever we visit that part of the town. As I’m sure you have already discovered, because parenting can be so overwhelming and stressful, it can bring out the worst in us and highlight the darkest parts of who we are. But you shouldn’t beat yourself up over that epiphany; it’s just part of being human. Thankfully, most of the time, parenting brings out the best of who we are because we are driven to love, protect, and do right by those little beings who are our children.
    Another problem with “bad” messages involves not just the content of the messages, but also how they are communicated to your children. You may have the best intentions to convey a very positive message, but the way that you send it can change that message into something very different that is not healthy for your children. For example, you may want to send your children a message about the admirable value of hard work and achievement. But the way you send that message is by constantly nagging them to do their homework, materially rewarding them for good grades, and showing disappointment and frustration when they fail to live up to your expectations. Given these surface messages, it’s likely that your intended message will be masked by the more explicit messages of mistrust, conditional love, and anger.
    The important thing to remember is that your influence over your children is a two-sided coin. Yes, you can do great harm to your children by sending them bad messages. At the same time, with the right message, you have the power to do wonderful things for them. If this discussion raises any red flags for you, don’t take it as an indictment of you or your parenting. Instead, take it as a call to action to do what is best for your children.
LET GO OF PERFECT MESSAGING
     
    You may now be thinking how much pressure there will be on you to always send the right messages to your children—to be on message 24/7. Fortunately, I don’t believe in perfect parenting—a truly unattainable goal—because before we are parents we are human beings, flaws and all. Also, kids are very resilient. They can have a lot of bad stuff thrown their way, and they still turn out just fine most of the time. Gosh, children have survived and thrived for ages under much harsher conditions than those found in twenty-first-century America. So accept your humanity and realize that the occasional outburst of anger, show of impatience, or act of expediency won’t hurt your children. I hope the message you’re getting is that even if you send the wrong messages sometimes you won’t be a bad parent and you won’t scar your children for life. The key is to make sure the
preponderance
of your messages are good ones. If you can maximize the healthy messages and minimize the unhealthy messages, your children will turn out just fine (all else being equal, of