I have frequently witnessed parents who lean toward obsessive, indulgent parenting.

It is, in my limited experience, a Western phenomenon, visible in more wealthy counties. 

While it sounds heretical I have encouraged many parents to have a life outside of their children. I promote the idea that children were never intended to be a parent’s reason to live (something I have often heard). Think of how much pressure that is for any child to shoulder. Children will crumble or rebel under the pressure of indulgence and worship. 

Divided attention (“I’ve got other things I have to do.”) is probably better for children than undivided attention (“I instantly drop everything when my children need me.”). 

I suggest parents pursue friendships with other adults and chase interest in the things they are good at like art, music, literature.

A healthy parent engages in activities that have nothing to do with his or her children or with parenting.

This usually enhances parenting and does not detract from it.

Nothing in the above suggests the promotion of child neglect. 

Far from it.

I’d suggest child indulgence is itself a form of neglect. 

Self-neglect will do your children no good at all, especially if the energy you do not spend on yourself is spent on over-caring (indulging) for your children.

The power of moving from Entitlement to Gratitude

Entitlement focusses on what you lack or think ought to be yours and what is not happening for you. Gratitude highlights the people who enrich your life and the things that enrich your life and are yours even beyond your deserving.

Entitlement enlarges you (usually only in your own head) and who you think you think you are, and what you need and what you imagine or believe you deserve. Entitlement distorts. Gratitude helps you to see you are part of a whole (a family, a community) and allows the needs and conditions of others to enter your awareness and your experience. Gratitude modifies and delivers you to a beautiful size. 

Entitlement may increase your self-importance in your own mind and in the way some people treat you (it can be very subtle) but it will also alienate you (it can also be very subtle) from those who want to know you and befriend you. Entitlement leads to being stand-offish. Gratitude will make you warmer, easier to approach and befriend.

Entitlement may, for a time, get you what you think you want. It may have others treat you in ways you think you deserve. Gratitude will transform you into who you are unaware you could be. 

Loving yourself is a rather good idea.

It’s your longest relationship.

You might as well enjoy it. 

Given that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made” what’s NOT to love? You are a highly complex and powerful person, capable of so much. 

Besides, rejecting yourself is draining, tiresome work, naturally flows into rejecting others. 

Love all-round rejuvenates all-round.

Loving yourself gives others a fighting chance to love you. Someone has to lead the way. Besides, if you don’t love who you are, how can you possibly expect others to? Loving yourself makes you easier to be with, it’s more fun to be around a self-assured, self-aware person. 

Loving yourself makes you safe. Self-loathing people are short fused, quickly triggered, lash-out kind of people.

One benefit of loving yourself is being able to see others more clearly, especially your immediate and extended family. Your family traits, urges, passions, will become clearer to you, easier to accept and embrace them, rather than resist. Self-love helps you to see how terrifically beautiful all other people really are. 

Self-love transforms your every perception and how you treat everyone and everything. 

Inner conditions are contagious. 

Others reap the benefits or feel the sting of what’s going on inside you.  

Loving yourself is a prerequisite for loving anyone and anything.

My siblings and I enjoyed each other and a local park….. just prior to my son’s wedding

I’m always on the lookout for illustrations of how different families build different family cultures.

Your “normal” in your family was probably quite different from other families regarded as “normal.”

A young man raised his hand in a class I was teaching recently. He said he had an illustration of exactly what I was talking about. He told of being invited to spend the night with a new friend from school. 

The two boys were playing video games in a room designed for that purpose and the plan was to be up late and sleep in the next morning.

“My new friend’s dad came into the games room very late and hugged my friend and kissed him on the forehead and told him he loved him and that he’d see him in the morning and to have a great night playing games. When his dad left, he also said goodnight to me, I thought someone in the family had died. I asked my new friend if everything was ok. He could not understand my question. I told him that if my dad came and hugged me and said goodnight and that he loved me I would think there was really something bad going on.”

“My dad does that every night,” my new friend said.  

Today is the day to live completely.

It is of this day, of this week, and of this month that you will say in years to come “those were the days” and look back with longing and nostalgia. 

Open your eyes to the beauty around you. See that even in the problems, even in the hardships, even in the brokenness, there is an intricate beauty. 

Possibilities abound.

Potential untapped surrounds you on every side. 

Life itself waits for your involvement, and your involvement trips cogs into action, and action on your part brings forth insight, and the insight, when linked with courage and commitment, ushers in a deep appreciation making a future worth wanting. 

Life’s beautiful for the person who can see his own beauty.

This is not some act of self-admiration but an acknowledgement that the miraculous lives within us all. 

Want no trivial self-indulgence, for it leads only to a darker pit. Instead, lift you sights to the needs of others, to the joy of children in your life and to the beauty that hides within each and every one of life’s challenges. 

This is the day, the week, the month, you will remember if it’s filled with appreciation, courage and adventure.

When parents (married or single) are fulfilled, pursuing careers and interests they love, and are offering meaningful service to their community, it makes a remarkable difference to their children. Under these (admittedly) ideal conditions, childhood can be fully childhood. It can be carefree, safe, and free of the anxieties that come rushing into a child (which sometimes never abate) when a parent refuses to meet the adult demands of his or her role.

It is an overburdened child who must do all he or she can to keep mom sober or keep dad at work  — who must do all he or she can to make mom or dad into an adult. It is the anxious child who must take on parental responsibilities, who must function on a parent’s behalf when the parent abdicates the role.

Childhood is appropriately prolonged (as opposed to inappropriately truncated) when mother or father takes adulthood with the dedication adulthood deserves.

When parents take full responsibility for themselves, dedicating themselves to exercising their skills and callings within their greater community, and pursuing and enjoying mutual, respectful, and equal relationships with other adults, childhood, for the children of such adults, can run it full span, and the children can be appropriately oblivious to the pressures of life in the adult world.

My sons racing on the street outside our home —– beautiful times

Seek someone who considers himself or herself to be a fellow learner and who is exploring his or her own life and family.

Seek someone who will challenge you to find your true Self which you may have lost in marriage, or parenting, or career. He or she will challenge you to be your appropriate size which you may have compromised to fit in or beloved and accepted. He or she may have to help you to trim down your size after you expanded into bullying behavior during periods of self-doubt. 

Seek someone who knows therapy sessions are about process, about  reactivity, rigidity, fusions, cut-offs, triangulations, over-functioning, under-functioning and not content. 

Seek someone who helps you identify and clarify your helpful and unhelpful attitudes and behaviors so you may gain clarity and self-awareness, pathways to personal responsibility, blame avoidance, greater maturity.

Seek someone who is an expert in the Art of Listening, someone who is curious about you and your life but is not inquisitive about it. Someone who knows the difference between empathy & anxiety, love & worry, thinking & feeling, asking questions & being inquisitive and intrusive. 

Seek someone who can engage you and be an advocate for your health and strength and who believes you know what is good and healthy for yourself. He or she will get out of your way, avoid trying to read your mind, and avoid offering you insights and interpretations that  you are fully equipped to discover and uncover for yourself.

I spent weeks with a group of international students teaching what constitutes healthy relationships and mental health.

Several participatory exercises encouraged assertiveness from participants.  

During a break 4 (single) women from the same leading industrial nation asked to speak privately with me. They informed me that if they lived according to the principles I was teaching no man from their culture would love or want them. Haltingly, they declared, their men want weak women, needy women, women who expect her man to be in charge.

Consequently I have routinely, on 5 continents, encouraged women to become the kind of people weak men find terrifying. Similarly I encourage men and boys to become the kind of men who welcome and embrace strong, self-starting, interdependent women. 

Interdependent? 

People who know how much they need others and how much they don’t. 

Weak men will, and do, confuse love and control, even regard control as some form of spiritual gift – and this they do in all areas of their lives. 

Such control or “care” parades as love and will seduce a woman looking for a “strong” man, any man.

I assured my students that there are indeed men within their culture who are men enough to love women who are women enough to be strong and assertive women.

Health and strength attract health and strength.

Love and control cannot co-exist in any relationship.

There is great power and pleasure in stopping, being still, getting off the treadmill of activity, halting your mind from scanning and searching and being on duty. There’s great pleasure and power in resting, reading nothing, checking nothing, getting caught up with nothing.

There is great pleasure and power in observing the surroundings, picking up designer themes, details which are easy to miss if seeing is done without concentration, or seeing is done without looking. To look deliberately can be transforming.

There is great power and pleasure and sometimes pain in listening with intensity to what people are saying. It may facilitate hearing what others are not saying which may be the core of a desired, even desperate message. What is skirted and avoided will be heard by the avid and trained listener. Listening is a full body activity. 

There is great power and pleasure in choosing to be present, to be near, to be focussed on what another person needs, wants to say, confesses fears, admits to loneliness, is anxious about almost everything. Presence is a gift that it seems few are aware they are able to give. Silence and presence often hold hands. 

There is great power in choosing to love even though he or she who seeks to love will seek no power (Msimimngu, in Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country).