Support Your Child’s Goodness

Good parenting supports the child’s goodness.

This is an INSIDE job, because “goodness” is an intrinsic quality.

We can define the child’s “goodness” as:

* Her genuine manifestation of love
* His radiance of pure innocence
* The heart-touching expression of herchild’s inner, spiritual beauty

To support your child’s goodness, you have to CONSCIOUSLY connect with the child’s heart.

Blindly reacting with annoyance to the child’s behavior may break the child’s trust and so block the freely flowing expression of the child’s loving heart.
Parents need tips for nurturing and protecting the child’s goodness.

One of the most important parenting advice tips:Develop yourSELF-discipline to avoid reacting so harshly that you unwittingly break the loving connection between you and your child.
Try to sense how your child is feeling deep down inside during your parent-child interactions.

This sense is really your only reliable guide for the kind of “good parenting” that supports your child’s expression of goodness.
Think of your child’s heart as an extension of your own heart, your child’s joy as an extension of your own joy, your child’s love as an extension of your own love.

Establish yourself in a state of sensitive attunement to your child’s feelings. This is the foundation for:

* Parenting wisely
* Truly understanding your child’s needs
* Recognizing when to give-in to your child and when (and how) to draw the line

Help for parents:

* Remember that by nurturing your child’s heart with feelings of love you support your child’s ability to behave in kind and caring ways.
* Develop your ability to stay in touch with how your child feels by remembering to PRACTICE keeping your heart attuned to your child’s feelings.
* On a frequent, regular basis calmly observe your child as you try to sense how she is feeling.
* To excel in the kind of “good parenting” being addressed here, at the end of each day, review your parenting episodes.
* Note in particular those instances when you reacted with annoyance and forgot to remain connected to your child’s heart.
* Then resolve to remain more centered, more firmly rooted in your sense of your child’s feelings, in the flow of love from your heart to your child’s.

Applying these practices is how we grow into “good” parents.
Tips for parenting need to go beyond mere tactics for controlling child behavior.

To develop good parenting behavior, we need to PRACTICE:

* Remaining centered in love
* Relating with our child as sacred
* Trusting in our child’s intrinsic goodness
* Establishing necessary boundaries in a firm but loving way
* Pausing before reacting in order to first understand what our child needs from us to do better
* Attuning to the wisdom that guides us from our hearts in the present moment
* Remembering our intention to remain in touch with our child’s sacred heart at all times

And we need to relentlessly persevere in our practice, no matter how many times we let ourselves down, and no matter how hard it is to do.

This is how we build up our ability to demonstrate the kind of truly “good parenting” that helps our children preserve and express their intrinsic goodness.