When Lack Of Confidence Takes Over Your Parenting
What makes little toddlers so confident?
They seem to just carry on with their own business with no worries.
Even if that's walking towards a staircase that they could potentially fall down from... No worries, they'll just do an impressive wobbly U-turn right at the edge of the top stair and miraculously save themselves! (Alhumdulilah for the angels that protect our kids).
Kids are funny; despite being smaller than us, they scare us all the time!
I remember a friend’s 8 year old climbing a tree so high that she could barely be seen. The tiny dot was all that was visible of her daughter.
What did my friend do when she was told by other kids? Turn around and look away. She couldn’t bare to see.
This might sound strange, but parenting our kids often calls for us to hold our breath or turn the other way when kids are in potential danger.
That sounds counter-intuitive. If a child’s in danger, you should run and rescue, right?
Not always.
There’s certain situations when doing something risky is part of our child’s growth and it helps them to develop to their next stage of ability.
Kids need to grow, take risks, learn new things, master them, then challenge themselves further. That’s what they do.
Denying them this in certain situations (not all!) can be akin to denying opportunities of growth.
Many young adults who have just approached their 20’s have expressed to me how not being allowed to face challenges and new situations during their upbringing now means they don’t know how to deal with certain things in life. They feel unequipped.
From a parent’s point of view – I get it.
It can seem as though we need to rescue them, or save them from tough situations. But quite often that’s because our hearts can’t bare to see them taking risks, or being close to potential danger.
However, it’s possible for us to allow our children the opportunities to grow through taking calculated risks without our hearts sinking.
Yes, we can have our cake and eat it too.
Here's a free training that will give you more insight into how that is possible: