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

disappointment, frustration, and anger toward them. In either case, the message that children get is that their parents’ love depends on their achievements. And this entanglement of parents’ and children’s selves can be a crushing weight on children, particularly in today’s culture of high expectations and hyperachievement.
    Messages of conditional love are usually subtle when children are young. They can be conveyed by the disappointment of parents when their children aren’t as developmentally advanced as their peers (despite the fact that early development isn’t highly predictive of later achievement). As children get older and become immersed in school, sports, and the arts, the danger is that the overinvestment on the part of parents mixes with the children’s vulnerability to those cultural messages of extreme achievement. The purity of the unconditional love parents feel toward their children when they were young can change into the toxic brew of conditional love for children school-age and beyond as they enter the results-oriented world in which we live.
    The harmful consequences of loving your children conditionally have been demonstrated over and over again in research. For example,children who believed that their self-worth was dependent on how they performed were highly self-critical, showed strong negative emotions, judged their performances severely, and demonstrated less persistence following setbacks. Additionally, children who received conditional love from their parents said that their joy in their successes was short lived and that they experienced considerable guilt and shame for their shortcomings. Adding insult to injury, children resented and disliked their parents for the way they treated them. And to show you the generational power of conditional love, mothers who said that they received conditional love from their own parents felt unworthy in adulthood, and, in spite of their hurtful experiences with conditional love, these mothers were more likely to treat their own children the same way!
THE “DARK” MESSAGES OF LOVE
     
    The challenge for you when your children are young is not that you consciously reward your children with love and attention when they, for example, first sit up or walk, or punish their failures with anger or rejection. The challenge is to become aware of the unconscious, and often unhealthy, messages of love you may be prone to send to your children. Your goal is to convey positive messages of love, not the messages that are being sent from your “dark side,” the side of you that is driven by your baggage.
    It’s completely natural to get excited when your children achieve some developmental milestone, particular if they reach it sooner than most children. And you may very well feel a twinge of disappointment or frustration when your children aren’t as far along in their development as their playmates. That, too, is a normal reaction for parents who want their children to be the best they can be. Plus, few of us are entirely immune to the feeling that we will be judged based on our children or to the messages from our parenting culture that earlier and faster is better. But if your reaction in eitherdirection is too extreme, then your children will probably get those messages of love from the “dark side.” The goal is for the expression of your love to be appropriate to the situation and in your children’s best interests, not extreme or unfitting for what they did.
    I experienced my own dark side of love when helping Catie learn to ride her bike without training wheels when she was four years old. While I was pushing and supporting her, she wasn’t looking where she was going, trying to pedal, or steering straight ahead. After several gentle reminders, I became increasingly frustrated and irritated by what I perceived to be her lack of effort and expressed this in a clearly angry tone. Within minutes Catie was in tears, and I experienced the worst parenting moment of my fatherhood. I had done exactly what I counsel others not to do; I allowed my baggage, in this case my perfectionism, to dictate the messages I sent Catie about her biking. Of course, I felt absolutely horrible that I had hurt my daughter. And I was afraid that I might have “scarred” her biking experience and that she might not ever bicycle again! In fact, Catie didn’t ride her bike for several weeks, but then one day she asked if I would go out with her for a ride. As we