Let's do a quick recap of Part 1 of this series that is near and dear to my heart - most importantly because children are our future. We must be careful about what messages we expose our children to in a language that they can comprehend.
We will pass away one day and leave the world behind for our children to live in. Let's make a concentrated effort to leave a world that our children will love to live in and cherish every moment of their lives and remember us with fond memories when we become just a photograph on the wall or a digital image on a computer. We owe it to our children to provide them with the fun-filled childhood that they have a rightful claim to. In this article, let's consider another common cause of anxiety disorder in children.
Who's Life Is It Anyway?
It is human nature to see our own reflection in our children. This is almost a reflex action that we adults feel when we have a growing child in our lives. We want the best in our children and want them to be the shining star wherever we live. This is a healthy outlook towards our children, but what's unfortunate is that often times, we try to impose our own ideals and aspirations in our children. We adults forget that our children have the right to their own identity and must be given the freedom and maturity to choose what they want to do in life.
Instead of counseling them or asking for their opinion, we often try to force them into habits and activities. I have come across many adults who want to see their children achieve what they themselves had always dreamed about but never fulfilled them in their own lives. This may cause severe stress to the child's psyche when he or she is forced into doing something that they don't have an ability to do.
We need to understand that not all children have the same abilities that we adults would like them to have. Can abilities be developed? Most certainly you can groom children up to acquire certain abilities, but as adults we need to understand that training is not everything. The DNA and the chemical structure is unique for every person and variations to this chemistry in our body are key factors to what our abilities will ultimately turn out to be. So through training, it is definitely possible to impart the skills, but that does not necessarily mean that the individual will enjoy applying the skills in his or her own life. The point I am trying to make is we adults often forget to recognize the unique qualities of our children and imagine a day when our children will become what we had tried to be and failed. This is inappropriate handling of our responsibilities as parents and child caregivers.
Little do we pause to think that our actions might be creating stress on the child's mind. If he or she is unable to cope up with what we want and what our expectations are, we often vent our frustration on our children. Even mature adults drop like stones under the influence of depression and anxiety - imagine what happens to the immature mind when she finds a frustrated parent trying to enforce something that is not within her realm of abilities. This sense of failure might not be expressed overtly, but it creates more than a black hole in the child's psyche - depression sets in. The same depression could lead to anxiety and potential panic attacks in the future. With every future moment of parental frustration due to a non-performing or under-performing child, the black hole continues to widen.
Where do you think the child will be when he or she reaches adulthood? In the dungeons of depression with no self-confidence, with no self-respect and with not firm ground to stand upon to face the challenges of this world.
Parents and child caregivers - pause to think about this for a moment. You've had your chances and probably fell short - that is perfectly ok. If everybody became an Einstein or a Michelangelo this world would not have seen most of the brilliant minds that we cherish today. There would have been no Pele, no Mozart, no Mother Teresa and the list goes on.
How do you know that the child that you want to become the engineer that grows up to develop the spaceship that will carry man to Saturn and back over a weekend, is actually a budding Beethoven or a Pele or a Nadia Comaneci even a Florence Nightingale?
A Child's Right To the Freedom of Choice
So what is the anxiety therapy for children in this situation? It is OK to expose them to what you want them to be and as a parent or a caregiver, that is the right you acquire when you become responsible to bring the child up in this world. But remain sensitive and watch out for signs that indicate rejection. You will know in your heart if your child has the abilities to follow what you want him or her to do or not, so remain in that monitoring mode all the time and pull out if you sense that things are not going to turn out to be what you expected.
Expose the child to everything else that life has to offer in small but generous samples and help the child develop that maturity to choose their path in life. A pros and cons discussion after every sampling goes a million miles to ease the stress in your child's mind. You are essentially providing practical and rational answers to their favorite "Why?" Be that lifelong educator that holds the child by the hand from the time he or she is born to the time when they have their own children and beyond. Give your child the gift of a childhood that is free from adult-enforced stress - you will be appreciated one day.
A child's brain is like a sponge and I'm guilty of indulging in this repetition. Be careful about what you expose it to - the future of your child depends on it.
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