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

They enter this stage as largely helpless little beings and leave it with most of the major tools necessary to evolve into fully functioning adults.
    The canvas gains in richness and complexity in your children’s preschool and elementary years. The basic skills they mastered in toddlerhood evolve into more sophisticated expressions of who they are and what they can do as they prepare to enter and progress through their elementary school years.
    If you’re reading this and your children are already beyond elementary school, rest assured that it’s never too late to begin sending cogent messages to your children. I’ve worked with parents who had sent confusing and even unhealthy messages for most of their children’s lives into their late teens. But, even at such a seemingly late stage by which you might think that young people are fully formed and no longer malleable, parents who altered their messages saw their teenage children change for the better. Though your impact on your children will ebb as they progress through elementary and high school, you will still have a tremendous influence on them for many years to come. As a result, you must continue to send them healthy messages that will help them resist the unhealthy messages that will ever be present in their lives.
    The specific strategies that I discuss in
Your Children Are Listening
focus on the toddler, preschool, and elementary school years and may not always be applicable to older children. At the same time, everything else in this book, from the ways in which messages are communicated to your children, to the obstacles that prevent messages from getting through, to the essential messages I describe, is relevant to the entire spectrum of young people. You should never stop sending positive messages to your children, and the information in
Your Children Are Listening
can help you to shapeyour messages to the unique needs of your children at their particular stage of development.
A WORLD OF UNHEALTHY MESSAGES
     
    In earlier generations, being a good parent was easier. Parents could trust that most of the institutions that composed their society—schools, communities, youth sports, and popular culture—sent mostly good messages, messages that aligned with those of the parents. The cumulative effect was that children were inundated with healthy messages from just about everyone and everything around them, and that unhealthy messages were by far the exception rather than the rule.
    Times have changed. Now, many schools are so focused on test scores and budget deficits that they either don’t have the time or energy to devote to healthy messages or they are sending the wrong messages. The student culture is frequently toxic: Pressure to grow up too soon, peer pressure, cyberbullying, and the emphasis on physical appearance, affluence, and popularity create additional unhealthy messages for children. Communities that were once tight-knit are now often transient and disconnected. Youth sports, which were once about fun, fitness, and love of sport, are now often about fulfilling the frustrated dreams of parents, earning college athletic scholarships, or preparing for professional or Olympic success, fame, and fortune, however unrealistic these goals might be. Finally, although popular culture has always had a rebellious dimension, it did, in times past, send primarily good messages to children. Television and radio, for example, had a Congressional mandate to act in the “public interest”—in other words, to provide programming that was positive and healthy. Whatever the public interest may once have been, it no longer governs the media. The sole purpose of popular culture now is to make money, with little consideration of its corrosive effect on children.
    Because of these powerful negative influences on your children, you have to be, as they say in the political world, “on message 24/7.” If you’re not, your children will not only fail to get your messages, but they probably will get the unhealthy messages to which they are going to be increasingly and continually exposed.
MESSAGES EVERYWHERE
     
    The idea of the power of messages on children didn’t actually come to me from my work and experience with children. The reality is that we hear about messages constantly these days. In politics, the goal is to control the message and stay on message. Why? Because, in the political world, the party that controls the message has the most influence