While she needs training and guidance, it shouldn’t be in an overbearing manner, writes John Muturi
Many parents do not know the impact of their words and actions on their children.
When you’re always critical of your child, you arouse in her feelings of rejection. Screaming and continuous criticism tell a child that you don’t love her or care about her feelings.
Parents reeling under low-self esteem are obsessed with finding fault with everything a child does. The child is convinced that it’s impossible to please her parent or to measure up to their expectations. Such a child is devastated when she gets the same treatment in school from her peers and teachers. Feelings of not being accepted don’t always have to be verbal. A lack of appreciation or recognition speaks as loudly to a child as if it were verbally pronounced. Criticism, whether spoken or unspoken is by far the most common and destructive cause of low self-esteem.
Excessive sheltering
Refrain from being an authoritarian as this weakens a child’s self-worth. If you constantly tell her what to do, she develops few inner controls and lacks faith in her own abilities to carry out a task by herself. While she needs training and guidance, it shouldn’t be in an overbearing manner.
Over-protectiveness or excessive sheltering may have the spiraling effect of feelings of rejection because the child never has an opportunity to make decisions for herself. It’s okay for you to control her environment during early years of her life but from age four, she starts to desire some form of independence. Your initial reaction may be to defend and smother her. However, this only inhibits your child’s progress. Learning to cope with small problems will strengthen her emotional growth and positive self-image.
Many parents are unaware that they show rejection to their child through lack of interest. The message they send to the child is that she shouldn’t bother them with her problems because they have their own troubles to sort out.
Emotional temperament
Some parents are more accepting and loving than others by virtue of their emotional temperament.
Other parents are unaccepting by nature, and they often nurture rigid notions about right and wrong.
Often parents play double standards. While visiting a church, restaurant or a friend’s house where our child’s public behaviour reflects back on us, we tend to be less accepting.
And when friends visit our homes, we may get upset over manners that we would accept at other times.
The secret is the ability to accept the child at all times, while perhaps not accepting everything she does. You should differentiate between the child’s behaviour and the child herself if you want her to build a positive self-image.
