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The Questions We Answer, Whether We Want to or Not!

This work is done by Pam Levin. Source : Family Issues Volume 11, Number 2, 2003,, 1865 The University Of Maine Cooperative Extension. (And I took it from a presentation shared by my teachers in my Transactional Analysis training.) Our children (and therefore, all of us) grow up asking certain developmental questions that shed light on our behaviour. I would love to go into details of these soon and I will. Go through the stage that your child belongs and correlate the question with his/her behaviour. You will find that all the difficult (or not so difficult) of your child stems from this the effort of your child to answer these questions encoded by nature. Especially, look at Age 18 months to 36 months and 3 to 6 years. These two stages in our child's life prove the most energy-consuming for us as parents. See that their limit pushing is not their fault - it's nature's mandate to them. If your child is behaving, in any manner, according to these stages - it is nothing but

Self-Care

 We hear a lot about how parents devote themselves completely to their children. Parents leave their jobs and change their routines upside down and that goes on for years. It happens for so long, that for many of them it changes the very course of their lives. There's a something to understand about this devotion. That this devotion may not be allowed to turn into a "sacrifice". This devotion when turns into a story of "You know, child, it's when you were born, I stopped doing... this and that". "You know I could have been someone, had it not been for my child's birth." There's always a self-incriminating phrase in these stories. "I mean I enjoyed it all...but...". As parents, we need to decide for ourselves why we have children before having them and once they are here - do what you can to raise them - with pleasure and pleasure alone. Let them all be choices that we make together - as two parents and the surrounding support syst

Sharing is Caring?

As a parent who goes to the playground with my child, I hear this often. Sharing is caring. The top-down moral beating that we as parents feel obligated to give our child - so that "they turnout okay eventually". Here's the situation: Your child is not sharing her toy: Her own toy, which she owns, which she brought down to the play-area, with a thought of playing with it. And we tell her, you are not being caring towards others by not handing it out straight away (That's what we want her to do, innit?) Let's reflect on this act of sharing. When do we share? Do we share when we feel deprived of something, or when we feel abundance?  Suppose we took our favourite food to lunch at work - it got to 3pm for your team to sit down to finally have lunch - your barking mad hungry. Will you share, willingly? Wouldn't you much rather - gulp it all in one go, yourself!? When we force our children to share, we push them into a state of deprivation. The opposite of what is