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

to your children through many different conduits. The quality and quantity of messages you send and the specific conduits through which you send them become internalized and, as a result, become your defaults for what messages you send and how you send them as your children develop.
    Let’s be realistic. Sending positive messages is, in many ways, easier when your children are young because they remain inside the “family bubble” with few outside influences, either on them or on you. But once they enter the social and cultural world of school, the number and intensity of messages from the “real world” ratchet up a great deal for both of you. Your children are exposed to many messages from their peers and popular culture that aren’t healthy. That is obviously where the importance of early positive messaging from you comes in; those messages establish healthy defaults that will help your children resist the later noxious messages.
    But you, too, are exposed to many messages from your peers and popular culture that are equally harmful. You will feel pressure from these messages to “keep up with the Joneses,” for example, topush your children to get better grades or win more in sports, which may leave you vulnerable to sending them messages that you don’t really believe. Here is where the real benefits of early beneficial messaging and creating healthy defaults in
you
come in. When you create positive defaults for the messages you communicate to your children and the conduits through which you send them, you gird yourself against the toxic messages that you will surely receive as your children get older.
WHAT MESSAGES?
     
    The most important thing that you can do to ensure that your children get the right messages is to know what those right messages are. This understanding is not a given for new parents. To the contrary, expectant and new parents often don’t give much thought to this aspect of their young children’s development simply because they have other more pressing priorities in caring for their children, namely, managing their sleeping, crying, feeding, and pooping. Before parents know it, their infants become children and, because raising children doesn’t get any easier, other priorities arise and parents still don’t seem to have the time or energy to devote to these all-important developmental concerns. Without deliberate consideration of what messages you want to communicate to your young children, the result is that, at best, the messages you do send will be random and largely missed by them. And at worst, you will send an entirely wrong set of messages to them.
    The question that you have to ask yourself is: How do we figure out what the right messages are? Before I share a process you can use to flesh out those messages, I thought that you might find interesting the findings of a survey that asked children four to eleven years old what they wanted from their parents. First, they wanted more attention from their parents and for their parents to be more available. The children wished they had more solo time with eachparent and that they could choose what they did with them. They said that they definitely wanted rules even though they often resist them. The children in the survey wanted their parents to protect and love them in more noticeable ways, so they would feel safer in a world which they feel is out of control. For example, they really liked spontaneous expressions of love and being checked on at night. These children did not like being yelled at by their parents. Finally, they said that they enjoyed “family rituals, routines, and predictability.” As the saying goes, “Out of the mouths of babes …”
    In-depth discussions about parenting philosophies and styles should be prerequisites, ideally, before couples have children (or even before they get married), but realistically, if you have these conversations any time before your children reach toddlerhood, you are ahead of the game compared to most parents. In my practice and my group of friends with children, I’m amazed at how little discussion there is about parenting approaches and the lack of consensus that many couples have in how they want to raise their children.
    A good place to begin this discussion is to each share your own experiences as children, since most of us either copy or try to do the opposite of what our parents did with us. Examine what messages each of you received as children, how those messages