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

messages to your children, whether consciously or otherwise; and, equally important, what prevents your messages from getting through to them.
    Part Two , I Like Myself, focuses on the messages that help build self-esteem, which is the foundation of children becoming confident and capable people. This section will examine the role messages of love, competence, and security play in developingself-esteem and the best messages to send to instill this all-important positive perception in your children.
    Part Three , I Like Others, explores the messages that will help your children develop the ability to relate to and connect with others. This section considers how compassion, gratitude, and the Earth play essential roles in this relationship.
    Part Four , Others Like Me, looks at the messages that your children need to understand so that the world at large can connect with them. Respect, responsibility, and emotion are the messages that are highlighted.

Your Children Are Listening
     

PART I
Get the Message
     

1
The Why and the What of Messages
     
    For you to send the healthiest possible messages to your children requires that you fully buy into my notion that
children become the messages they get the most.
Though I think it is a pretty intuitive and reasonable concept, I feel the need to thoroughly convince you of the profound value of messages to your children’s development. To really win you over, I want to explain the why and the what of messages.
WHY MESSAGES?
     
    I’ve always been a bit of a tech geek and first adopter and, for some time, I’ve been blogging on the psychology of technology for a variety of Web sites. One concept that I come across frequently in the technology world is “default.” For those of you not familiar with what a default is in tech-speak, it’s defined as a “preset option: an option that will automatically be selected by a computer if the user does not choose another alternative.” Although I didn’t understand why for some time, the idea of defaults has always resonated with me and struck me as meaningful on a psychological level.
    You may be wondering what a computer default has to do with raising children. Well, in raising your children, whether you realize it or not, you’re creating a set of default options for just about every aspect of their lives. To paraphrase the computer definition above, these defaults are “automatically selected by children if they do not deliberately choose another option.” In other words, your children’s defaults are reflexive responses to their life experiences, including their first thoughts, emotions, decisions, and actions in any given situation. Defaults, whether healthy or unhealthy, are very important for children because they are the first options that will arrive in their “inbox” when they are faced with a choice. If you can “install” healthy defaults in your children, you are increasing the chances that they will choose the healthy option over other alternatives that might be more attractive to them, but would also be potentially harmful.
The Importance of Defaults
     
    There are several reasons why defaults are so important for children. The cognitive sciences have demonstrated that people in general attempt to be as efficient as possible in choosing and taking courses of action. This means that whatever mechanism will enable children to come to a decision most quickly will likely determine the course they choose. Defaults provide that efficient mechanism.
    Also, recent neuropsychological research has shown that the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with so-called executive functioning—such as impulse control, risk/reward comparisons, future planning, and decision making—is still developing well into children’s teenage years. This means that, without proper defaults, children are not only more likely to act without thinking, but also more readily swayed by external forces, such as peer pressure and popular culture. In other words, children will usually have knee-jerk reactions to, rather than make deliberate decisions about, the situations they face. Whether children have healthy defaults,unhealthy defaults, or no defaults at all will, to a large extent, dictate what their reactions will be.
How Defaults Develop
     
    Defaults develop early in your children’s lives from several sources. Role-modeling from parents, peers, and other people visible in the lives of young children provides them