Family Matters

Most people do not like to talk about their rules, but they have them for everything. There are rules for living, rules for dying, rules for work, rules for home, rules for riding the bus and rules for eating in a restaurant.

Everyone has rules for establishing self-worth. Just like the need for approval forms in our early years, due to our relationship with people who are significant to us, our definition of self-worth comes from them too. Parents and educators are the main source of our thoughts about our self-worth.

Whether we like it or not, problems are part of life. Success is not about what happens to us in life, but about what we do with it – the good and the bad. One of people’s irrational rules of living is the expectation to be able always to find a solution to a problem, [...]

If you think about it, from the day you are born, everyone around you tells you what is right and what is wrong. In previous generations, parents used “the carrot and the stick” to teach kids about right and wrong. Anger and punishment were the stick and smiles and rewards were the carrots. Some parents, following the example of their own parents, even used real sticks, belts and denying of physical touch as punishment, while using physical gestures like a hug and a kiss to say, “You’ve made me proud”.

Unlike “right and wrong”, which are viewed as absolute and indisputable, there are cases where someone controls the situation and simply enforces his or her personal preferences. It is a subjective type of black and white thinking.

In all my parenting workshops, when I ask parents about the most important thing they wish to give their children, happiness always gets the highest score. Yes, we fight with them over school, bad influence and cleaning their room, but if we had to choose only one thing we want for our kids, it would be to be happy.

Every person feels anxiety sometimes. It is a natural reaction to what is perceived as danger – an evolution of the “fight or flight” response. While for most people, experiencing anxiety in small doses is normal and healthy, for others, feeling anxious about the future or about situations over which they have no control may cause real interference with daily living. It is the frequency of the fear and the perception of danger, when in fact there may be no real danger, which causes anxious people to avoid participating in “normal” activities.

Most, if not all the people in the world want to be happy. Happiness is also what parents want to give to their kids most of all – more than money, health and many other things. Yet, many people believe that in order to get the most happiness, they must avoid unpleasantness and hardship as much as they can.

Children are born into this world needy and helpless. They are born without the ability to speak, without the ability to express their feelings clearly, without the ability to satisfy their own essential needs or change anything in their world. They are equipped with one skill to rule their world – crying.

What happened in the past has a great effect on our present. We take our experiences from what happened to us and add them to the bank of beliefs, thoughts and attitudes in our life. Sometimes, we place too much importance on past events and allow them to stop us from getting on with life.